WARNING: THIS IS A STORY OF VIOLENT SEXUAL FICTION.  IF YOU ARE 
UNDERAGE OR OFFENDED BY ATHEISTIC PORNOGRAPHY, THEN PLEASE, 
FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, DON’T READ IT.

Samson, Gladiator

By Chip Masterson

For Dick

The hot wind out of Africa whirled dust along the Sacred Road.  The emperor squinted at 
the twisting devils that rose from the thick pavers surrounding the stadium.  It had been a 
long day.  

Commodus’s driver whipped his horses around and rattled the chariot up the Celian Hill 
to the sprawling Domus Augustiana, the imperial residences.  The Praetorian guard 
swarmed around him as he dismounted, entered his house and stopped for a moment to 
pick a sprig of sage in the peristyle garden and roll it around his fingers.  Servants ran to 
guide him down and into the bath, tenderly soaking off the dried blood and dirt with 
sponges.  Commodus thought briefly about the chained prisoners and drugged tiger he 
had killed in the arena, and the sour look Gaius Scipio gave him as he bowed.  The 
Nemean Lion costume was quickly taken out to be cleaned and the emperor’s stringy 
limbs and sagging skin delicately scraped and rubbed with oil.  I love winning, he 
thought.  And thought again of Scipio, and the treason trial he would stand just as soon as 
Commodus decided he’d committed it.  Absently, he said aloud,  “Is there anyone 
anywhere greater than the mighty Hercules Romanus!”  The servants knew better than to 
answer even “No, my Lord.”  They simply continued their work.

As a loose linen shirt was draped across his shoulders a nervous page arrived and 
dropped to the floor.  The governor of Sarmatia was waiting, with a horrid gift.

***

Karkus received the Roman proconsul by kneeling.  More merchant than warrior 
horseman for generations now, the tribal chieftain paid his tribute of gold and wheat 
without a second thought.  In fact, he was thinking of a caravan late from Bactria, and the 
interest running up on the insurance.  Spring was late on the steppes, the roads clogged 
with mud.  He’d have to drop down to the Black Sea after all, in the next week or so.  
Why should he pay attention to what he was doing now?  It was only a peace offering to 
keep the neighboring empire from making too many demands; they remained free and the 
secret alliance with the Germans was quietly affirmed by a like tribute.  But Karkus 
smiled at the official’s platitudes as if he were really listening, as if he really cared.

A young man of sixteen watched the scene with eyes the color of wild grass and had 
second thoughts rioting in his deep-muscled chest.  He watched his handsome father’s gut 
thrust to the side as he rose to clasp the Roman’s forearm, he saw his father’s mouth tic 
with worry that was not the worry of his degradation or his people’s submission to fat 
foreign fucks, but the worry of finances and agent fees.  Before it was appropriate the boy 
stormed out of the tent.  A Roman soldier attempted to block his way but he simply 
shoved his hand into the bronze breastplate and knocked the battle-hardened veteran back 
on his ass, leaving as a reminder the print of his hand in the thick metal pecs of the 
cuirass.

The rolling grassland swept north and east under patchwork sun and shadow, and the 
young man ran out into the land his ancestral glory, and ran and ran.  A line of dust traced 
his route up over the low hills, and the angrier he ran, the more earth churned up into the 
sky, chunks of dirt and rock propelled by the footfalls of this superior boy of whom even 
the gods were afraid; or so said the priest, to himself.

Below him a herd of mustangs grazed lazily; never in the past would a wild herd be 
permitted between the sea and the Chinese desert but now they feared no one.  A young 
male clearly led; he must have recently killed the older stallion in a duel.  The boy raced 
down toward them, his grief and fury bursting its banks.

The horses would never have been frightened of one man, running at them; would never 
have even noticed him, had not something in their animal sense pricked at danger in the 
wave of muscle and hatred rushing at them with unnatural speed.  They bolted, but there 
was no escape, not now, and not ever.  None of them could outrun this lanky muscled 
god-boy.

The leader shot forward, feeling the boy’s steely eyes upon it like a heavy storm lashing 
it to the ground.  Every pulse drove it faster and faster yet it could feel the danger closing 
the gap, outgunning him.  Terror spurred it toward a narrow valley whose hardened floor 
promised greater speed.  Samson saw the valley too, and, hating cramped spaces, leapt; in 
a flash panic raced through the horse as it realized it was too late; long knotty arms 
crushed tight against its thick neck and balls of pain sank into its hide.  

The young mustang twisted around to kick the boy but those arms wrenched muscles 
loose deep into its shoulders.  The boy laughed hungrily and let go; the horse turned and 
jammed its back legs into the boy’s belly.  Pain blinded the horse on impact as its legs 
fractured in spirals  and hooves split open.  The boy fell back a few steps but didn’t fall, 
and barked at the horse’s scream of pain.  He pounded his fists against his abs harder than 
the horse had kicked, and barked again.  

The mustang fell to the ground and instinctively reached toward the boy, snapping his big 
teeth.  Again the boy laughed and thrust his forearm between the horse’s terrorized jaws 
and hardened the muscles as he had hardened his abs against the kick.  It bit and its teeth 
drove up into the jaw, which broke at the hinge.  Pieces of teeth fell out of the horse’s 
mouth as it gagged on its own blood.  The boy then reached down, grabbed the horse 
around its ribs and heaved it up into the air, balanced against his pecs.  He squeezed.  Full 
survival panic burst in the horse and despite its injuries it writhed and kicked at the air.  
The boy staggered but crouched low, thighs absorbing and handling the shocks and his 
arms squeezed tighter.  Vertebrae began to dislodge against the boy’s pecs as each 
striation bulged and rippled against the horse’s struggling muscle.  And still his arms 
squeezed.  

Air wheezed out of the horse’s mouth and blood-clotted nose in huge red bubbles and it’s 
strength began to fade as the boy’s arms prevented inhalation, instead forcing every 
remnant of air further out.  He squeezed.  And squeezed.  And squeeeeeeeeezed.  Now 
flesh instead of air began to froth out of the horse’s mouth as its ribs bowed and its proud 
chest caved in beneath those hot angry human biceps.  His pecs increased in size as well, 
forcibly dislocating ribs from spine, stretching and popping tendons as they mounded and 
rose above his own breath-heaving ribs.  His quads quivered from the effort and strain 
and with fury he rose to full height and locked his knees, ramming his disobedient 
muscles into compliance with his will.  The horse sagged across his shoulder as even the 
boy’s head pressed into the ribcage, cracking bones with the force of his trunk-like neck.  
His lats flared and rippled as they pored man power into the struggling animal.  Like a 
cincture his arms crushed a depression into the horse’s body and bent bone splintered like 
shots and pierced organs and arteries.  In agony and terror, the horse shuddered as one 
final crushing SQUEEEEEEEEEZE forced blood and lungs to shoot out of the horse’s 
mouth.  Blood, bile, shit and urine exploded out of the horse’s cock and ass (BOTH) and 
streamed down onto his hard glistening torso.

That really pissed him off.

Gritting his teeth he sneered and laced his fingers together, since now they touched, and 
with a final growl brought them down to within inches of his cramping pecs.  Bone and 
flesh tore apart and the horse’s dying thought was of its broken back.  Gripping portions 
of the horse, he ripped it apart, tricep-heads piling up against other as vertebrae popped 
and meat tore and the horse suddenly flew in two halves away from his gore-slathered 
chest.  He roared his triumph and birds flew into the sky; small rocks crumbled off the 
cliffs in the ravine.

This had been his first battle, one that went unrecorded, one which never reached 
Emperor’s ear.  But it was the one the boy remembered most fondly of all.  His first 
victory over life.

He commanded his grudging muscles to walk and they had to obey his will, not daring 
not to tear or rip but growing stronger and ever-so-slightly bigger in response to his 
demands.  He walked and stretched his body and occasionally punched the side of the 
cliff in a burst that sent rock shearing off.  Then he walked faster, and faster, and 
commanded his legs to run.  Soon his speed caused the blood to dry into a dark second 
skin highlighting his naked muscles.

When he walked back to the his father’s tent he roared for him to come out.  The Roman 
proconsul, Cornelius Appius Piso, was had just left and heard the commotion and silently 
returned to the outskirts of the village to watch.  Only a couple of guards remained, as the 
area had been pacified for so long; the rest of the detachment had gone off for maneuvers. 

After a dignified delay Karkus came out and started with horror at the site of his unruly 
son naked except for dried blood and shit.  Yet the white eyes blazed with hatred from the 
hardened gore.  “For too long have you betrayed our sacred birthright by cowering before 
the enemy and sacrificing all that is good for expedience and good business.  You have 
no right to be the warrior king of a once-proud people.  Today you die.”

The king laughed, then stopped as he heard the eerie whistling coming through the boy’s 
nose.  “What bullshit are you talking about, and covered yourself with?  I’ll forgive this 
outburst once but my arms are still heavier than yours and you’ll feel my rod if you don’t 
obey me.”

The boy smiled, blood cracking around his mouth.  He licked at it.  “This is all that will 
be left of you, old man, when you feel mine.”

Karkus blazed with anger and strode toward the boy to strike him with his staff.  The boy 
stood his ground and the kind swung the heavy pole down against his traps.  The rod 
cracked and shook out of the king’s grip.  He grabbed his hand against the pain and the 
naked boy enclosed both hands in his fist.

“No, let me.”

A huge mass of muscle seemed to bloom in the boy’s forearm as his fingers crushed the 
man’s two fists.  He tried to pull away but the boy forced him to bend down.  A guard ran 
to the king’s aid but the boy’s other hand swung and sent the man sailing ten feet back 
through the air.  Blood seeped out from the boy’s fingers as bones crunched together and 
the king screamed.  He looked up and his face brushed the boy’s swelling shit-covered 
cock.  “I hate a dirty cock,” the boy said and forced it down his father’s throat.

His father gagged but nothing could come up past the gigantic head that stretched the 
man’s esophagus.  He tried to bite his son’s cock but it was so thick and hard his jaw 
dislocated.  He panicked as he felt his breath running out when the boy pulled his now 
semi-clean cock out of the man’s throat and let him fall to the ground and gasp for the air 
to scream as he landed on the mangled flesh and bone that had been his hands.

“This is how you have acted before the Romans.  Weak and crawling as you sucked 
Roman cock the way their ancestors sucked wolf tit.  You’re as disgusting as they are, not 
a man and not fit to live.”  Saying no more, he reached down and pulled his father up into 
his arms.

“You never hugged me either,” he thought as he put his arms around his father’s 
shoulders and pulled him to his grimy chest.  Guards came to hit him but their blows only 
hurt their own fists.  Swords were drawn but the boy slung the king around so fast they 
were afraid to strike; everybody raged and screamed. 

Remembering the horse, he muttered “I won’t be covered in your feeble un-man’s shit 
either,” and plunged his pulsing cock into his father’s ass.   With one hand he began to 
collapse the man’s chest and he placed his other hand on his father head and slowly 
began to force it to turn around.  The neck cracked and skin stretched as he twisted the 
head to face away from him, and the boy loved the feeling of his arm’s power cracking 
Karkus’s thick neck, and of that one other hard bicep biting into the man’s body and 
breaking everything that tried to prevent its full flexion.  The body spasmed and jerked 
and the boy shot come up into the man’s guts as with one final squeeze he burst his 
father’s heart.  Blood and come flowed out of his father’s mouth, nose and ears and 
slithered down his back as the boy kept coming, his orgasm continuing on for minute 
after minute of ecstatic pleasure and propulsed semen.  

He dropped his arms and his father remained impaled on his still turgid upright cock, his 
back-twisted head sagging against a shoulder.  With this grisly trophy the boy spoke to 
his tribe.

“You all are complicit in our humiliation before the Romans.  You deserve no name, and 
no king, before real men.  This,” he said, pointing at the grotesque corpse twitching on 
his yet-enflamed cock, “is what awaits you all if you do not disband immediately.  You 
are to choose no new king, you are to leave this land and live as wanderers.  Husbands 
shall leave wives and mothers shall abandon children.  Should I ever hear of any two of 
you coming together again for any purpose, or speaking our language, or calling 
yourselves by the names you used to be known by, I will return to do this,” pointing, “to 
each and every one of you.  Or worse.  I will hunt you down to rid the world of you.  
Your only hope is to do what I say and vanish into the shadows of the world.  I am the 
last king of the Kyrian people of Sarmatia.  They are extinct; they are no more.  Be gone 
with what you can carry and what animals you can handle by sundown.  When I return 
from my business with the Romans, I will crush whoever I find.”

People fled from him in silent panic and he roared again, flexing his biceps at them.  The 
mounded muscle peaked and hardened and seeing them, feeling them, he became aroused 
again and his cock, still hard, throbbed inside the still-warm body of his father.  Ignoring 
the two-hundred pound weight pressing against his cock he felt his biceps and tried to 
squeeze their hardness but even his fingers couldn’t dent the solid muscle that bulged 
from his arms.  His breath quickened at the pleasure and awe of his own body, his cock 
shuddered and again he shot into the slumped corpse, lifting it inches off his cock with 
hydraulic force as still more come boiled up out of his balls and jetted out.  Masturbating 
with the body, squeezing and pulping it around his cock until the last of the semen was 
squeezed out, the broken corpse soon just fell away in pieces, leaving only a thick dribble 
of flow.  

One man remained, furiously jerking off, his cock bloody and a jerked with dry spasms 
as Samson’s power had forced him to come over and over and over.  Samson looked him 
in the eye, placed his fuckfinger in the man’s vision, and guided his eyes slowly down the 
rippling curves of his body to point to that filth-covered cock.  The man crawled over on 
his knees and cleaned the cock with his tongue, slurping and devouring the blood, guts 
and bits of meat that hung off it.  His saliva flowed like a river, spilling out into the dirt 
and he continued over Samson’s hard flesh, bathing him in a supplicant’s only offering, 
his own fluid, his cock twitching as if possessed.  When he was done Samson stared into 
his feverish eyes, felt his pounding heart, and watched the flood of drool spill out of the 
man’s gaping maw in sheets.  He sneered and with a grunting lunge flexed that bicep 
again.  The man’s eyes widened, then bulged and turned bright red.  He swallowed his 
own tongue and fell to the ground, where Samson left him to choke on himself.  The man 
clutched at his cock even in his death-throes.

***

The Roman proconsul had fled from this horrific spectacle back towards the fort, sending 
the guards on ahead to spread the alarm, assuming the boy had rallied an uprising.  With 
his head start and swift horse, he never dreamed the boy would … could … catch him.

So the sound of footfalls behind him he assumed were horse-hooves, except they sounded 
too fast and light.  Turning, he saw the bare boy grinning only a few feet behind him.  He 
spurred the horse but the boy raced up alongside the straining horse.  Piso dug his spurs 
in as the boy butted the horse, knocking it out of stride toward the side.  The horse 
neighed shrilly and kept running and the boy butted the horse again, cracking a rib and 
sending it scrambling into the forest.  Before a tree branch could take Piso out the boy 
grabbed his cloak and pulled the man off the horse.  He landed against a root and grunted 
as the wind left him.  The boy returned and looked down at the soft man.

“I’m going to kill your emperor.  I’m going to pull down your temples.  I’ll destroy 
everything that’s beautiful.  Because you destroyed that in me.”  And he reached down 
and placed his head on the man’s bronze helmet.

Piso closed his eyes: this was the point in the death of Karkus at which his gorge rose and 
he fled the scene.  He braced for the twist but instead he just felt a kind of vibration in the 
metal.  He opened his eyes and saw the handsome, blood-crusted face smiling behind a 
writhing knot of forearm muscles.  And he felt five distinct points of pressure as fingers 
warped the bronze armor into his skull.

The man screamed and his heart nearly burst as he felt the five points grow harder, 
deeper.  Pain radiated out and then the pressure of the entire helmet collapsing under they 
boy’s feral strength built inside his head.  He grabbed at the boy’s arm and thought he 
held a living statue of Hercules, so hard and smooth and unyielding the muscles that 
worked under his struggling fingers.  The pain increased, the pressure grew until his ears 
rang and eardrums popped.  He tried to scream but nothing came out as the metal finally 
gave in to the boy’s muscle will and flattened, crushing the skull, enclosing it in hand-
mangled bronze.  A crease broke open along the top, hair and bone sticking out.  He put 
the body under his arm and ran towards the fort.

The alarm had gone out and when the boy approached the gate, dragging the proconsul 
by his flattened head, it closed with a heavy clang and the huge timbered bolt slid into 
place.  Arrows shot at him and he dropped the body and ducked back in among the trees.  
He knew instinctively the blitz attack would unman them most so he grabbed the nearest 
sycamore of decent size and encircled it with his arms.  And tugged up.

The tree shivered over the length and breadth of its ancient branches at the force.  He 
knew he didn’t have time to fuck around.  Crouching down he gripped the base of the 
sycamore just above the ground line and squeezed it tightly enough that it was about to 
implode, and exploded up with his thighs. The tree rose three feet off the ground.  Dirt 
burst into the air as the weaker earth tore open and those roots too distant or firmly set 
broke off under his teen muscle force.  Crouching down again he fastened his hands 
under the two thickest roots and rose again in a single burst that broke the tree free with a 
resounding crack that echoed off the fort’s palisade.  The arrows stopped.  Jumping over 
the empty pit of broken roots and rock he canted the enormous tree up against his chest 
and with a series of small heaves worked his way underneath to the balancing point.  
Shielded by the heavy branches from above (which broke off down below), he drove with 
blinding speed with his battering ram directly for the gates.

They boomed like some Titan’s gong and the entire wall shook.  Flaming arrows lit the 
branches on fire but he stood there and began battering the tree against the doors harder 
and faster.  It rang over and over with a growing din as the flaming tree splintered down 
to the thickest part of the trunk.  And still those giant arms drove it against the iron gates 
that now hummed a continuous knell.  He heard the heavy timbered bar crack on the 
other side, and saw the thick gates beginning to fold inward from his one-man-army 
attack.

Soldiers scrambled off the wall and tried to push war machines against the gates but it 
was too late.  Already the timber was splitting and the gateposts were breaking free of the 
surrounding wall.  They heard a boom and watched in horror as the heavy iron folded a 
little more, vee-ing inward and bravely struggling to hold out.  Braces cracked and bent, 
the one-way hinges twisted with every thrust of those demanding arms.  The centurion 
called a retreat to the citadel as with one final heave he drove the tree through the gates.  
They twisted off the hinges and flew back, rocking on the ground, bent and useless, and 
with a running start he held the tonnage of the just-living sycamore and hurled it onto the 
roof of the citadel, which promptly burst into flames.

The boy fetched the proconsul’s body and while walking through the camp watched 
soldiers fall to their knees before him, thinking him some savage pagan god.  He 
commanded them to assemble before the citadel and stood there as the fleeing governor 
ran into his chest and fell back on his ass.  The boy put his foot on Piso’s back and pulled 
his head off his body with a wet thwock.  The governor threw up.

“I will not kill you all yet, but tell your emperor that emperor the one who killed his 
father will kill him.  This is my pledge.”  And he dropped the hideously flattened skull 
into the governor’s trembling lap.

Turning his back, he addressed the garrison of hard-bodied soldiers.  “You all fled before 
me but you tried to fight.  You cannot fight these.”  He flexed his biceps and men who 
didn’t faint began to jerk off.  “But you are not men.  Men die fighting.  After each of you 
services me, I will brand you with my holy man-come and you will be my slaves.  You, 
centurion.”  He pointed to this rising cock, an organ the size of the centurion’s forearm.  
It was already starting to dribble.  Almost hypnotized by the size of that drooling virility 
and its one weeping eye, and the unyielding desire in the green eyes of the giant boy, the 
men’s own eyes widened with a hundred different responses.

***

Commodus was sitting now, even though hearing only as much of this story as the 
Governor knew.  “Killed whose father, his own or mine?  Damn barbarian grammar.”  He 
wondered if there was witchcraft involved; Marcus Aurelius’s death a decade and more 
ago at Vindobona had been sudden.  Stuttering, the Governor said “His own, I believe, 
my Lord.  The guards who witnessed it said things I wouldn’t have believed had I not see 
the size of the tree with which he bent and broke open my iron gate.  I heard he killed and 
fucked his own father, besting Oedipus.  I think he must be divine, my Lord.  It’s the only 
explanation.  No mere man could possibly … and he’s just a boy.”

Commodus nodded and the guard approached and beheaded the governor without a word.  
“I am the only divine man in the world,” he told the corpse.  And then, inside, he 
wondered if the prophesy was now coming true, that one would come who was greater 
than him, greater than death itself.  “I thought it was that Jew God they were talking 
about.  That at least is a relief.  I can get back to killing these mealy Christians with an 
easy heart.    He went in to dinner and was greeted with applause while servants sopped 
up the governor’s blood and dragged his body to the incinerator.

***

The legions who rode out to attack the Sarmatian tribe found an empty settlement 
trampled flat, as if abandoned in haste.  The garrison the nameless boy “enslaved” was 
gone as well.  Nobody knew where.  Or at least, nobody would say.  Fields of ripe wheat 
being eaten by mice were harvested by the grumbling soldiers.  Afterwards, it was 
reported that he turned up in Bithynia, in the arena at Antinoopolis.  This would be his 
first recorded “battle,” and the first source of rumors that eventually reached Commodus, 
who by then had forgotten all about the Sarmatian boy.  But the records, of course, 
cannot today be found.

Eight days of games had been sponsored by Publius Censorius Libanus, both as part of 
his civic duty and a bid toward election to the local senate.  So far the games had been 
lackluster.  There were plenty of exotic animals to slay, but the core of prisoners was 
down and so far only professional sparring had occurred with no human deaths, just one 
accidental leg-severing.  It was day five when the Sarmatian entered the town and the 
arena, seating fifty-thousand, was half-full for the tiger fight.  It didn’t help that the cats 
were chained and looked stoned.

Libanus fidgeted and kept smiling.  A runner whispered in his ear that a new athlete had 
arrived from the east, wanting to get his Big Break.  The excitement of fresh blood 
immediately cooled into worry: what if he was some goofy kid who didn’t know the first 
thing about what he was getting into?  What if he injured one of actors?  He smiled at the 
tepid applause as he rose and ducked into the vomitorium that led to the staging area.

When his eyes adjusted to the darkness under the arena floor he was immediately struck 
with animal lust for the young man standing nearly naked before him, with only a sort of 
torn hide around his hips that merely outlined his huge membrum virilum.  Libanus 
questioned the boy about his skills and though the boy’s Latin was coarse, he got the 
impression the horseman knew enough of provincial jousting methods to provide a good 
show.  And if he got killed, then that at least saved the last three days from boredom as 
people would throng in.  Then Libanus practically swallowed his tongue when the boy 
said he didn’t fight with weapons.

Immediately Libanus summoned messengers to spread the word that a new fight would 
be staged in an hour’s time, starring the unarmed Unknown Warrior against the 
undefeated champion Demetrius.  “Only one?” asked the boy, his smile a challenge.  
Libanus relished the spectacle.  It had been decades since he’d seen anybody display such 
spirit.  “Demetrius and all comers,” finished Libanus, and sent the boys out running 
through the town.  He offered the boy something to eat in the green room, and the boy 
hungrily picked up a whole roasted pig and proceeded to eat it snout first, spitting out 
only the larger bones.  Libanus felt wonderfully nauseous.

The arena was still boasting empty seats when alone and clad only his loincloth the 
Unknown Warrior strode out into the sun.  The audience gasped at the beauty of his 
musculature, the perfection of proportion that was only slightly unbalanced by an 
unnatural thickness in his upper arms and pecs.  He raised his long-fingered hands to the 
crowd and they roared approval.  Then a gate opened and Demetrius emerged, fat and 
hairy, with his long and short sword, followed by an Amazon with a trident and net and a 
Nubian minotaur with a club and dagger.  This shouldn’t take long, thought Libanus.

It’s what the boy thought too.

Demetrius cried out, a thin sound he’d made a hundred times before, a kind of signature.  
The crowd enthused.  He raised his sword and ran toward the boy who stood his ground – 
then seemed to have simply appeared in a new position, so fast did he sidestep the thrust.  
He trapped the sword blade against his thigh with his palm and bent it around his leg.  
Demetrius hadn’t let go, hadn’t had time to think, when the boy bunched up his bicep and 
punched him in the face so hard in caved in.  The body twittered and dropped to the 
ground and the Amazon threw the net over him and jabbed with the trident.  The Nubian 
tried to knock his legs out from under him with the club but instead shouted with pain at 
the impact and dropped it.  The heavy ox-head muffled the yell and the crowd roared.  
The trident hit the boy’s abdomen but the Amazon couldn’t thrust it in.  He stood there, 
net-draped, and she shoved and shoved … and he flexed and flexed and though his heavy 
skin beaded with blood the muscle would not let the points in.  Reaching up, he grabbed 
the heavy hemp net and began tearing it.  The ripping sound of heavy hemp fibers 
shredding as his arms moved mercilessly down filled the silent arena.  The Amazon 
backed away but the trident seemed stuck: she pulled and it wouldn’t come out of his 
belly.  She let go and then, his muscles tugging and tearing the net, he stopped flexing 
and the trident fell to the ground, points bent and flattened where his abs had trapped 
them.

The boy spun and brought his fist down on the bull’s head hard enough to crack it open.  
The Nubian sprawled back, stunned, and shook the filthy remains off his shoulders.  
Samson let him rise and the Nubian, with a foot and probably fifty pounds on the boy, 
jumped with a steely glint and a cry upon the boy’s shoulders to wrestle him to the 
ground: but the boy turned swiftly and caught him mid-air and raised him up over his 
head.  The Nubian tried to reach down but the grip on his balls and traps exploded pain: 
and he felt the boy’s head press into the small of his back.  He felt his body bending 
backward so he flexed his back muscles and contracted his abs to full rigidity: and the 
power against his doubled, and doubled again.  His heart sank as he felt his muscles 
quiver and rip, as more and more of the arena came into view and the boy kept bending 
him in the blinding light.  

By now the boy’s biceps were throbbing with pain but he kept pulling.  The Amazon 
came at him with the short sword Demetrius had dropped but the boy spun and kept the 
Nubian’s flailing legs between them.  The black giant’s spine cracked and he screamed, 
blood spraying out of his mouth.  It cracked again, and people in the stands vomited at 
the man’s cries and the eerie sight of his agony.  Then the Sarmatian teen pulled the man 
off his head and held him in front of his body, delts bursting into star-patterns of hard 
manhood, and with one final sneer and c-c-c-c-crack SHOVED the Nubian’s head against 
his feet.  

He dropped the corpse and strode toward the Amazon, who shrieked and ran backwards.  
Libanus wasn’t ready for this amazing show to end so giving some secret signals, had 
three unchained leopards released into the arena.  The archers around the perimeter grew 
nervous and stood ready as the cats paced toward the fighters.

The boy decided to put on a real show, unlike anything anyone had ever seen.  He was 
going to frighten the cats to death.

One of them leapt for the Amazon who slashed at it but missed and was knocked down 
immediately.  The cat’s paw on her neck cut off her air and it bit her face.  She flailed 
until it tore out her neck and tore off a chuck to eat.  But its hackles rose and it suddenly 
looked around to see the boy looking at it the way it had looked at her.

The boy charged the cat and its initial, animal reaction was to back away, snarling.  The 
other cats positioned themselves nearby and he whipped around and snarled back at them 
all.  Each took a step backward.  He smiled cruelly and holding his arms down, tightened 
all the muscles in his body and bellowed.

People in the crowd held their heads at the intense sound and the cats furiously writhed 
away from him.  He tightened up again and yelled again, his traps rising up like ridged 
domes beside his neck.  The leopards snarled at pawed the air ... but didn’t attack.  Then 
he rose himself up to full height and spreading his arms to the side, flexing his lats and 
leveling his chest, he threw back his head in a yell that deafened people outside the arena.  
A new wave of spectators thrust into the seats to see a man facing off three leopards.  

He laughed and raised his arms.  He flexed a bicep, and then pointed at it, nodding.  The 
cats snarled and edged closer.  Then he flexed both of them and jumped at the cats and 
again, instinctively, they fled.  The crowd screamed.  He set up a rhythm, flexing his 
biceps and bouncing his pecs one after the other in an undulation that seemed hypnotic as 
it built in speed, then increased in complexity like African drums.  One of the musicians 
caught on and tried to imitate the sound on his kettledrum and the crowd roared.  By now 
the provincial governor had taken the seat of honor and Libanus sat behind him, proud as 
a new father.

Confused by impulses to both kill and flee, the cats hissed at the boy.  Surely this one 
man couldn’t be stronger than any one of them, much less three.  Yet his smell was not 
the smell of fear, it was wild and angry and strong.  They grouped closer together, timing 
the attack, but he charged them again and they scattered.  He chased one, catching it by 
its hind leg and swung it around his head.  It tried to twist but the speed was too great and 
just as its hip separated he flung it at the others.  They all grouped together and he stalked 
them slowly towards the end of the elliptical arena.  

Backed against the netting, they frothed and writhed in fury and terror and he 
approached, flexing and tensing his muscles, pointing them out and glaring at them.  
Feints and yells had them pawing and twitching as he got closer and closer … until he 
was merely feet away from them.  Opening his mouth, he sucked breath into his gigantic 
chest and belted out a yell that brought blood from their ears, with a look of such insane 
glee that the air filled with the acrid scent of urine and their eyes rolled up into their 
heads.  They all fell flat, motionless.

He walked away and the crowd started to boo.  Then they noticed the animals weren’t 
moving.  Trainers ran out and held the limp beasts up and reported they’d been scared to 
death and the crowd, disappointed, stomped feet.  Samson walked up to the proud 
governor and spat in his face.  

Trembling, the governor rose and turning his thumb down, barked orders to execute the 
traitor.  The crowd booed and gladiators and also soldiers advanced, but warily.  The boy 
had had an hour to learn the layout and knew exactly where everything beneath them 
was.

Backing away, he stamped his foot into the sand and the heavy oak flooring caved 
inward.  Two more stomps sent a huge chunk of inches-thick wood clattering onto the 
cage below.  He bent over and cracked off sections of flooring and threw them behind 
him, sand flying into the eyes of soldiers and archers.  He reached in and grabbed the top 
of the elevator-works with one hand and heaved backward.  He rose a few inches as iron 
twisted and pulled loose from the concrete walls.  He flared his lats and pulled again, 
shattering the bolts and dragging the cage full of tigers straight up to the next level, where 
they would have gotten out and taken a ramp to the surface.  But then he heaved again 
and single-handedly wrenched the cage with three half-ton Asian tigers up to the surface 
with sparks and the screech of iron on stone.  The arena fell silent.  The gladiators 
stopped advancing.  Using his other hand, he ripped it up into the air.  The tigers 
sprawled against he bars and he levered it sideways with sinewy arms and swung it 
around at a group of men.

The cage plowed through them and into the archers behind the net.  The cats screamed as 
the corner of the cage hit hard enough to crack the stone wall and bend the bars enough 
for the tigers to squeeze out.  They emerged angry and bloody and pounced upon the 
screaming men while the Sarmatian boy kept ripping up the floor, a sheen of pungent 
sweat dotted with sand increasing the glare off his rippling muscles.  He came to another 
cage-elevator apparatus, this one full of gladiators, and this time he jumped down into the 
hole.  

They tried to poke him with swords and poles but he stamped on the cage and bent the 
top down.  The poured concrete shaft was tight and the bars buckled inward beneath his 
leg power.  He stamped again and the cage broke loose and fell one flight to the bottom, 
bent deeper.  He stamped his feet again and again, mashing the solid iron like clay to 
crush four men to death with imploding bars and their own weapons.  One man’s 
thighbone burst through to stab his partner in the kidney.  He left them writhing and 
moaning and leapt up to the surface, his quads firing him feet above the surface to land 
with a wood-creaking thump.

They had heard what he did, heard the metal give and the men shriek like women, 
without needing to see anything the spectators pored into the vomitoria, crushing each 
other to get out.  The governor and a shaking, pale Libanus, his political aspirations and 
possibly his life over, ducked out their private exit.  Leaping onto the podium he lifted the 
governor’s throne over his head and smashed it down into the arena.  Mounting the steps 
to the top of the stadium, he seized the poles that held up the tarps and bent them in his 
hands until they cracked and broke.  The strips of canvas fell onto the last few remaining 
people and he stood on the rim of the arena staring down at the governor and soldiers 
below.  

“Tell your emperor I shall kill him like those leopards.  And you’ll have this to remember 
me by.”  He knelt down and raising his fist, struck the edge of the arena.  The heavy stone 
cracked down to the next level, the marble facing fell off and a chunk of rock the size of a 
man’s head broke free and tumbled the three levels to the street.  

“Who are you?”

The boy thought.  He wasn’t his father’s son.  No name among his people could describe 
the man he had willed himself to become.  And the Greek heroes were all a bunch of ass-
fucked perverts.  Only one, a hero of the Hebrew bankers who came into Sarmatia from 
the cities of Parthia, was worthy to lend his name to this boy’s greatness.  Another mortal 
man who killed lions, slew armies, and tore down temples with the strength of his hands.

“I am Samson.  No man – or god – may stand before me.”  So he didn’t quite have the 
legend right.  For that matter, he wasn’t even sure who the emperor of Rome was.  But 
that didn’t matter.  He knew who he was.  That was all that mattered.

***

The governor hadn’t wanted him to leave Bithynia alive, and was resigned to sacrificing 
possibly half his army to kill this astounding Samson, when out of nowhere an entire 
garrison of Roman soldiers, their faces encrusted with semen, appeared to escort him.  On 
the way out he spat in the governor’s face again and grinned as the man trembled to do 
anything against him and his army.  They marched out and camped a few miles away.  
The army attacked in the night.

Not a man of the garrison died.  No one even fought.  Samson had suspected they’d come 
like cowards in the night and waiting in a narrow pass, hid behind a huge outcropping of 
rock that supported the cliff above.  Pressing one hand into the rocky cliff face, began 
building up pressure against the granite outcropping.  Small pebbles and dirt sifted down 
as all that weather-beaten, eroded granite felt Samson’s power.  Then he inhaled and 
started in earnest and what the cliff had thought was power had merely been a breeze.  
Shock-wave energy rove the stone in heavy echoing cracks and solid tonnage shifted in 
its bed as the silent army halted.  Rocks fell down upon them and they danced away … 
and the suddenly the gap filled as a twenty foot block burst forward in a cloud of dirt and 
an avalanche of trees and rocks tumbled loose, liberated by Samson’s arm-pressure.  The 
gap was sealed and from the dim cries, most of the army dead and buried.  The survivors 
would limp back with the tale.  Now, he was horny and had a legion to coat, fill and plug 
with his semen before dawn.  The heavy pre-cum was already glistening on his shaft 
when he walked into the sleeping camp, and salty scent made the men hard in their sleep, 
and their aching hardness and the lure of that salt woke them hungry with the desire only 
one man could fill.  And overfill it, for each of them, he would. 

***

News of the carnage at Antinoopolis spread quickly and every town Samson came to shut 
its gates against him.  He laughed, thinking how shoddy and small most of them were, 
compared, say, to his pecs.  But he let the women (for they were all women who refused 
to face him, cock or no) cower behind their silly walls, and his army took what they and 
he needed and fed and tended to him as befit a cult of Man.  He stood outside gates and 
offered challenges in the arena but no one dared take him up on it.  They simply dropped 
gold over the walls and begged him to let them go.  And usually he did.

But every now and then it pissed him off, and he’d let them know it.  Once, in Pontus, he 
slammed his fist into the thickest part of the wall near the gate.  For a few punches it held 
out against his scraped knuckles, but then he reared back and wailed on it.  The stone 
cracked down to the foundation and he kept battering it, chipping and hacking into the 
rock.  Fractured beyond what any fusillade of catapults could muster, the wall finally 
caved in under its own weight.  Samson approached the largest chunk, a block that must 
have weight three tons.  Grabbing it top and bottom, he heaved and it rose off the ground 
slowly, defying gravity to drag it down.  When he had it overhead, he crouched down and 
thrust it into the air.  The block rose impossibly into the air until the larger planet’s pull 
could overcome that muscle-thrust.  It landed in the middle of the city like a meteor, 
creating a crater feet deep and leveling blocks of apartment houses.  A fire started at a 
bakery whose furnace was shattered.  Leaving the citizens to their business, he left.

But usually he passed through without such incidents.  Months passed and, as he knew 
would happen, arrogant men began to doubt the stories and feel their own firm muscles, 
thinking them “hard.”  So when he arrived at Antioch in Syria, a huge fat brute calling 
himself Colossus had scrawled graffiti on the city wall inviting Samson to dinner and a 
match.  Samson felt that was awfully sporting of him.  All that food would be added 
spectacle when he popped.

***

The arena was SRO with runners stationed to relay the events to crowds which thronged 
the piazza surrounding it.  Even the local Christians were skulking about, wanting to 
know what happened, though their patriarch had forbidden them to attend the games.   
The consul, Lucius Annaeus Gracchus, planned for Colossus and Samson to be the final 
match in a day of slaughter, and by midday the butchers were overwhelmed with exotic 
meats for the patricians and having trouble getting the skins off in good condition for the 
furriers and tanners.  Arguments were stifled only when Samson appeared, and the 
overwhelming smell of testosterone coming off his ripe balls in palpable waves enforced 
a sense of inferiority upon them.  He ate raw tiger meat without asking and they marveled 
at his powerful jaws macerating the wild muscle, and how impossibly tight and small his 
waist remained no matter how much he consumed.  Even after that great meal with 
Colossus with wine, beer and water his concave belly never changed size but appeared 
empty.

As was becoming the custom, Samson strode out first and stood alone, awaiting the 
“challenger,” though that would be the local champion.  Colossus was more than that, 
though; he was undefeated on the entire Antiochene gladiatorial circuit, which stretched 
from Palestine to Ephesus.  Well over six feet tall and 350 pounds of strong hard fat, he 
easily crushed, sometimes literally, anyone who came against him.  He bent (specially 
prepared) iron bars apart to release captives from cages.  Even in the staged world of 
professional gladiation, he broke rules and legs without concern, and had killed men by 
simply dropping and sitting on their chests.  Samson, having culled these stories from the 
man himself over the feast in his honor, decided to play along.  The roar of the crowd was 
invigorating, appealing.  He found he liked the approval of these spineless creatures, and 
the curious contempt he felt for himself was easily channeled into rages yet untapped.  He 
closed his eyes and drank in the roaring.

Colossus stomped into the ring, sand bouncing off the floor with each step.  Samson 
didn’t move, didn’t turn, but stood with his back turned and remained smiling, eyes 
closed, with hands raised to the cheers.  Colossus jumped up and down hard enough to 
crack the wood beneath him but Samson actively ignored him.  The crowd loved it.  
Colossus didn’t.  

Racing up behind Samson, hands clenched over his head, he used his momentum to 
swing a bull-stunning blow smack at the base Samson’s neck, between his shoulder 
blades.  At first the fire in his hands, fingers and wrists from the impact – and amazement 
that Samson stood rock-solid as if a fly had landed on him, only one small muscle 
twitching it off – shocked him: but then, a split second later, Samson staggered forward 
clumsily and went down on his hands and knees.  To the crowd, it looked perfectly real.  
Colossus chose to believe that it was… to his detriment.

Swaggering up, he kicked Samson in the belly and again his joints screamed and his 
kneecap nearly dislocated as the boy remained in place, only a moment later with the 
blurriest of twitches to fly as if kicked over, tumbling in the sand.  Colossus ignored his 
soreness and the screech in his head that said “RUN!” and, towering over the boy, 
stomped his foot down into the boy’s abs.

This time his ankle fractured and there was no escaping or hiding the pain.  His eyes 
bulged and he bit through his tongue trying not to scream but Samson wasn’t ready to 
take charge yet.  He grabbed the leg as if in agony but really held Colossus up and in 
place, and seeming to climb up the rigid body of the fat giant, quickly jammed his hand 
into the man’s mouth and then shrieked himself.  The crowd believed the blood that spat 
out of their champion’s mouth was Samson’s.  They ate it up.

Furious and confused, Colossus swung his ham-sized fist and caught Samson in the delt.  
Samson flexed it in such a way it appeared as the fist had crushed it, when in fact a 
tendon snapped in Colossus’s elbow.  In flying away from the blow, Samson pretended to 
trip Colossus so that his fall would be explained, then bounced back and leaped astride 
the hard belly, as if to strangle his opponent.

Colossus’s rage enforced predictability, and he immediately rolled over the compliant 
Samson.  He pressed his enormous gut into Samson’s body, and Samson slapped at the 
ground with hands and feet, emitting groans and yells.  Colossus bounced, the fat finally 
protecting him from the unnatural hardness of Samson’s muscles, and then spun around 
for “the kill,” resting his ass on Samson’s chest.  For good measure his legs pinned 
Samson’s arms and with his hands he held Samson’s mouth and nose shut.  And he 
bounced up and down on that massive chest emitting foul flatulence.  

Samson, however, could hold his breath a long time.  When he tired of this act, which 
seemed to be all Colossus was capable of, he decided to stage his dramatic comeback.  
His hands reached feebly around Colossus’s thighs and weakly tried to pull them apart.  
The giant bounced and laughed.  Then he felt suddenly nauseous as Samson tightened his 
biceps so fast his shins splintered, and pulled those fat thighs down until his knees 
cracked.  

Screaming in pain, he release Samson’s head and the boy sat up, still clutching those 
broken legs.  The crowd went silent at this awesome display, the boy rising to sit while 
holding the giant to his chest, and the leaping to his feet.  Colossus fell backward and 
flailed, unable to upright himself and Samson, inspired, decided to re-enact the story of 
Hercules killing Antaeus, whose feet of course could never touch the ground lest his 
strength be restored.  Grappling Colossus about his waist, he started to squeeze.  The man 
shrieked as those arms pressed in and were soon obscured by the fat falling over them.  
Samson began to sweat.  The man was so fat, he was harder to strangle that the mustang 
or Karkus.  He squeezed again and heard discs pop in the man’s lower back but still the 
solid mass resisted … and then he thought of the mess.

Determined not to inundated with this sloppy champion’s innards, he remembered that 
the consul’s name, Gracchus, had reminded him of his father.  He heaved the giant over 
his head. 

The crowd roared at his power.  To make it last, Samson threw the man up into the air 
and caught him, each time a little higher, as if her were a child.  His bronzed arms rippled 
in contrast to the concussing fat as they hurled and received the great weight, huge 
bruises appearing all over the massive body.  Colossus cawed with pain and madness 
when Samson caught him and balanced him one hand, the fat pressing down his arm.

Again, the crowd fell deathly silent.  Cocking his arm so the burgeoning biceps seemed 
nearly to explode, he threw Colossus into the wall of the arena underneath the Consul’s 
throne.  The scream and blur were almost too fast to perceive when he hit with such force 
the distended gut ripped open.  Blood, intestines, organs, chunks of fat the size of babies 
and half-digested food splattered the aristocrats and Gracchus, gaping, caught much of it 
in his mouth.  

Not wanting to lose the crowd’s approval, he stood before the consul and said, “I do not 
apologize, to anyone, for anything.  But seeing as how you had your best cloak on, I will 
accept your punishment.”  A glint in his eye further enraged Gracchus and after he 
finished rinsing and spitting, gave the order.

Two elephants were brought up from below, bulls with short tusks and small ears.  The 
arena creaked beneath their combined ten tons.  The chains around their hind legs were 
attached to manacles, which were fastened to Samson’s wrists.  “You survived one fat 
fuck, but can you survive the largest monsters in the worlds?”

Everyone laughed … and Samson realized they were laughing at him.  His nascent love 
of the crowd died at that moment.  He’d give them something to laugh about: the 
survivors, anyway.

He asked for the right to last words, and that granted, called a messenger to him.  The 
messenger carried the message out of the ring and Samson said to the crowd, “It’s 
private.”  Gracchus hardened his frown and gave the go-ahead, oblivious to the legion of 
soldiers now shouldering through the crowd to block all exits from the arena.  The animal 
handles poked the elephants and grudgingly the beasts began walking away from each 
other, until the chain lifted from the ground and Samson’s arms were outstretched.  

One of the Christians who sneaked in, disguised, thought he looked like his god in that 
moment.

Gracchus had instructed them to draw this out, and looked forward to hearing the joints 
pop in the arrogant man’s arms.  He gave the word and the trainers gently prodded the 
gray giants.  Six stump-like legs moved forward but two – the two attached to chains, 
only tugged a little.  And Samson grinned.  And Samson tugged back.

The elephants felt a jolt that made them each trumpet.  Angered, they pulled again, only 
to find their back legs locked into place.  The trainers jabbed them and they swung their 
trunks around.  They felt their back legs actually being pulled BACKWARD.

Samson was flexing his biceps.  The crowd gasped to see the muscle peak on the 
outstretched arm, seem to thicken and grow before their very eyes.  His elbows bent, 
which could only mean that … yes, the elephant’s legs had lifted off the ground!  A roar 
went up that did little to appease Samson’s heart, now hard as the muscle that fought the 
elephantine tension trying to stretch him apart.  His biceps contracted, fibers twitched and 
bulged, and the legs lifted higher.  

Gracchus, inflamed by the insolence, barked to have him torn in half immediately.  The 
trainers changed to sharper barbs that they jammed through the elephant’s hide.  The 
beasts screamed and took steps forward, bringing their back legs down and stretching 
those biceps out again.  Samson held this position and tried to flex but the animals were 
stamping against the reinforced section of flooring reserved for them.  He tried to flex 
again and still the elephants fought him, front legs pulling forward.  They stamped and 
pulled, leaning their bodies forward until the chains seemed to stretch. Closing his eyes 
and shutting his ears, he summoned the image of his father’s fat gut kneeling to wizened 
Roman bureaucrat, and suddenly pulled his arms up, huge arm muscles peaking in every 
direction like an exploding star, pecs mounding and breaking into vibrant striations, abs 
sucked in like cobbles.  

The elephants screamed again as their bodies were dragged inches backward against their 
unrivaled straining … and began to be afraid.  Their hearts beat faster as they leaned 
farther into the pull, trying to put their tonnage of meat to advantage and again his arms 
began to straighten.  The left balanced forward on its front legs entirely and Samson lost 
his footing, hanging a moment and giving the beasts back their lost ground.  But he was 
soon upright, and angry at the echoing laughter.

And his anger was something no elephant would willingly desire to face.  Only these two 
had no choice.  

Savagely he curled his arms back up in quick, hard stages, his purple biceps almost 
sweating blood from the strain.  He literally dragged the elephants back through the sand.  
Fear broke out inside them and they tried to bolt but with an evil grin he brought his 
wrists together, flaring lats that made men weep, or hard.  Women ovulated on the spot.  
Sweat and oil glistened on his golden skin and the elephants stamped the ground and 
pulled helplessly against his arms.  

He stepped forward and the right elephant fell down on one front knee.  Jerking it with a 
snarl he flattened the beast onto its belly and brought that hand forward.  The other 
animal tried to twist its way around but he dragged that hand forward in three jerky 
thrusts and controlled him as well.  He took another step, then another, massive thighs 
bulging like each contained Jupiter himself, as his bent arms refused to extend, his 
shoulders heaved forward, his abs twisted and continued to pull and jerk and drag the 
maddened elephants along behind him.  

The one on its belly couldn’t get up, hadn’t time to find its footing as Samson kept 
dominating it with brutal jerks and pulls.  They were nearing the unreinforced portion of 
the stadium now and the upright elephant backed up and turned around, ignoring the 
chain that would trip it and stampeding directly at Samson.  He turned, forgetting the 
other elephant that dragged sideways as he did, and grabbed hold of the trunk just as it 
tried to butt him up into the sky.  

It would have succeeded had not the tension on the other chain been so great  … and had 
he not been able to break that tusk off at the roof.  The animal shrieked and tossed its 
head but Samson wrapped that arm around the trunk.  His bicep crushed into the 
muscular trunk as the arm curled around it and cut off the windpipe.  The elephant 
bucked its head but Samson pulled down on the tusk – and the elephant wasn’t strong 
enough to break free!  It screamed and jerked but he held it in place, crushing the trunk in 
the crook of his arm and forcing its head down into the ground.  His other arm 
shudderingly hauled the scrambling splayed elephant forward, his fingers clawing for a 
hold on the other elephant’s head.   Suddenly he yanked down and jerked the animal to its 
knees, then like lightning reached up and grabbed the other tusk with an overhand grip.  

Again the animal tried to twist it’s head free but Samson’s mastering arm held it in place.  
It tried to back away but those fingers enclosed the living ivory and crushed it with their 
sinew.  Fractures shot up into the elephant’s mouth and blood spurted out as Samson 
wrenched the giant tooth out at the root.  Hurling the tusk into the archers around the 
perimeter, he stepped backwards and hauled the animal along.  It tripped over the chain 
around its feet and crashed through the surface of the arena.  Everyone laughed, 
unbelieving, assuming it to be a trick.

This isn’t the show Samson wanted at all.  The other elephant hauled itself up and 
prepared to charge.  As Samson paused to decide what to do with the trapped elephant, 
the other charged and rearing up, tried to smash him down.  He put up the hand that held 
its chain and stopped it – for a second.  But the beast’s weight and fury were unexpected 
and Samson’s arm sagged and he fell to his knees.  The elephant roared triumph and 
shifted its weight to grind him down.

He felt the boards sag and creak beneath his legs and tried to raise his other hand against 
the foot but it was stretched tight from the other beast.  Shaking with the effort he 
struggled to his feet and still held the elephant at bay with one fucking hand, but his arm 
trembled and he couldn’t muster the force to throw five-plus tons backwards.  The board 
beneath his feet cracked and he felt a stab of fear … and since women feel fear, it made 
him angry.  Again.

Samson roared, a sound that nearly drowned out the cries of the two elephants.  His 
caught arm shook.  He willed it to hardened.  He strained against the fallen elephant.  It 
screamed at the pain.  His arm shook harder, his entire upper body turned red and his 
back thickened into a massive river of flowing muscle as he flexed harder, dragging his 
hand up to support the other one.  Veins throbbed and bloomed over the surface of the 
trembling arm.  The heavy oak creaked and splintered but held the fallen elephant in 
place.  The chain twisted under the strain and a sickening POP split the air: the elephant’s 
leg bursting out of joint.  The animal raged but only sank further into the hole.  And 
Samson’s arm jittered and gained more inches, his entire body PULLING the elephant’s 
leg until suddenly the iron band pulled off, dragging inches of flesh and breaking the 
animal’s toes.  It shrieked and sank further.

With both hands free Samson reached up and PUNCHED the foot of the elephant, 
breaking it and forcing it up into the air and over onto its back.  Again the wood cracked 
beneath it and Samson leapt onto its belly and began raining blows into its chest, cracking 
ribs beneath the heavy skin.  People could see the chest cave and dent from the blows and 
they screamed and rushed to the exits.  

Samson continued his crushing assault until the insane elephant rolled over and tried to 
crush him.  Again, he let it try, but braced his arms and pressed it up into the air.  It was 
too heavy to hurl from that position so he threw it a few feet, back onto the thicker 
section, and sprung up.  Grabbing it by its skin, he heaved it again over his head and 
staggered under the weight: he’d never felt so much weight above him and he knew his 
arms wouldn’t last long.  He hated earth at that moment and her nagging, insistent, 
unrelenting gravity.  He took some faltering steps and with a full body contraction 
HOCKED the elephant into the stands to the length of its chain, crushing people against 
the stone seats.  The bloody elephant scrambled for footing but the stone was too narrow, 
and it fell back down into the arena.  And Samson approached it again.  

It ran away.  But it was still chained to Samson and he jerked back and snapped the huge 
bones in the leg.  Still it tried to limp until Samson, with both arms, back and legs, 
PULLED: and tore the elephant’s leg off!  Then, swinging it on the end of the heavy iron 
chain, he beat the beast with its own bloody leg.  The animal blinked and grunted and 
Samson tired of this ineffectual death.  With one blow he hit the animal between the eyes, 
punching throw the bone and plunging his fist into the animal’s brain up to his elbow.

The other one had nearly fallen through, supported only by a crumbling wall digging into 
its back.  Samson contemptuously grabbed the crooked trunk at its base and began 
dragging it out of the hole, the heavy chains on his arms (and the one grisly trophy) 
ignored.  The wood stabbed into the elephant’s hide and broke off into it and the animal 
howled in agony.  But Samson relentlessly pulled it free.  Before it could stagger to its 
feet, though, he jumped onto its back and plunged its fists into the animals ears.  Huffing 
and groaning, he strained and twisted and people gasped as the saw that giant head rotate, 
struggle but fail to resist his arms even as the boy’s legs crushed into the elephant’s 
shoulders.  The head was sideways and Samson heaved with the effort of twisting it 
farther around until the titanic muscles finally tore apart and the neck snapped.  The beast 
sagged and Samson hauled it up and, running with it, hurled it up over the edge of the 
stadium.

It hit the side, tearing down the covering and spinning over into the crowded piazza 
below.  But only those who hadn’t gotten tickets in the first place were crushed. The 
audience had found all exits blocked by Samson’s come slaves.  Since weapons were 
forbidden in the arena they had nothing to fight with, and the guards couldn’t get through 
the literal crush.  People screamed and were hacked by Samson’s legion, and Gracchus, 
returning to the arena, gave the order for the archers to fire.  Less than half of them 
remained at their posts and they were so nervous they couldn’t target him.  Besides, he 
moved too swiftly, leaping up into the stands.

Samson began slaughtering everyone with his fists, raining death like Egyptian hail.  He 
hit men and women at random, a single blow caving in skulls, chests and backs.  He 
broke dead bones beneath his feet and worked his way through the crowd toward 
Gracchus.  He tried to hide behind his honor guard but Samson began hurling living men 
and women at them like stones.  When he reached Gracchus he smiled and said “Not the 
show you expected, was it?  Just think what the emperor will say … when I do this to 
him.”  

Samson reached down and grabbed Gracchus’s crotch, squeezing his balls into yowling 
mush.  He hefted the man up on one arm and let him feel, a moment, the elephant-
destroying power contained in it.  He launched the consul into the air fifty feet, sixty, 
seventy, well above the outer rim of the stadium: and still his power carried the man 
higher.  At a point where he could see all of Antioch, Gracchus felt himself stop: and fall.  
Straight down he fell and screaming, realized that he was aimed directly for Samson’s 
naked, erect cock.

He hit the cock with maximum force and it ripped up into his ass, which tore open as he 
split into two up to his sternum.  Again, Samson twisted and wrung the corpse around his 
cock but the sensation wasn’t the same; he’d done this.  What hadn’t he done?

Aroused and unsatisfied, he pulled the body down over his manshaft, halving it until his 
head rammed into the top of the man’s skull.  He rammed and rammed against the bone 
until his cockstrength shattered the bone and the bloody hair bulged up.  He thrust his 
hips again and burst through the top of Gracchus’s head, shooting tiny skull fragments 
into the air.  This sight made his semen gush, and soon the entire head was covered with 
lava flows of musky essence.

Forgetting about the hideous trophy stuck on the end of his cock, he battered his way 
through the crowd, down into the bottom of the arena where more desperate people were 
getting lost amid the tunnels and roaring tigers, a few finding the secret passage out.  
Samson found it too, and hammering a ring of death around him, stood in the narrow 
entrance.  And placed his hands to either side.

Terrified people gathered nearby and he said “You saw me draw my hands together 
against impossible forces.  Now you shall see me spread them apart.  For nothing made 
by any god can withstand my power.”

Heaving a deep breath, his elbows nearly scraping against his rugged intercostals in the 
black narrow passage, his tortured biceps fighting his marble-veined forearms for space 
as stretch marks zagged over their surface, he began to press into the solid rock that 
formed the foundation for the amphitheater.

Immediately the rock felt the first fraction of pressure Samson was capable of generating.  
It grumbled in response.  Small cracks spread through the rock as the weakest portions 
shifted in response to his hands’ thrust.  But still his arms hadn’t extended.  He increased 
his persuasion.  Something broke with a deep clink and caved and his left arm jutted out 
slightly.  He grinned up at the people and they began backing away.  Then he bowed his 
head beneath his meaty shoulders.

The right hand, thinner side of the passage, only four feet thick and bordering a large 
holding tank fully of blood-crazed baboons, began cracking diagonally up from his hand.  
His arms started trembling ever so slightly.  The right side, ten feet of bedrock, rumbled 
but held its own.  Speaking to rock which vainly tried to resist him more than to the 
terrorized people, he muttered “You thought you were hard, heavy, solid: but I’m harder, 
heavier and solid muscle.  You thought you were eternal, but –“ and here he screamed, 
the vein bulging in his trunklike neck, “you never dreamed you’d have to face the 
FORCE OF MY BICEP!”  

A deafening yell drowned out the heavy crash of his left arm straightening and the 
shoving solid stone out of place.  Cracks shot up through into the supporting walls and 
the arena groaned as the tunnel behind him caved in.  Baboons gibbered and screamed as 
stone rained down on them, some escaping through the caved-in bars to begin a wild 
killing spree.  Samson caught one and placing it’s head in the crook of his arm, flexed 
and crushed the skull for all who watched.  But he was hardly finished.

Turning to the ten-foot section of wall that had dared defy him, he punched it, bloodying 
his knuckles but fragmenting the surface.  He punched it again, and again, harder than its 
weakness could take, and the inferior stone gave beneath his fist.  He stood back and 
suddenly SLAMMED into the rock with his pecs.  Two fractured depressions appeared 
and bits of rock adhered to his skin as he pulled back.  Now the rock had come to love its 
destroy.  He SLAMMED his pecs against it again, and again and again, each time feeling 
things widen and shift and cringe away from him.  Again he thrust his pecs and 
something split deep inside the rock but it still wouldn’t budge.  Setting his back against 
it, he drove with his legs and grimaced: and the entire section moved an inch.  Screams 
echoed down from above and huge sections of stonework and cast concrete broke 
through the floor of the arena as the upper levels collapsed and arches broke open as 
Gracchus had over Samson’s cock.  He heaved again and the rock shifted and another 
extended crash carried the sound of external walls twisting apart.  Turning, he gave one 
final SHOVE with his arms and felt the tonnage skid around, brining tons of upper-level 
seating through the surface of the arena.  

Moving around, pistoning fists deadening men and apes at will, he came to the tiger cage 
where a number still paced, and knew it was carved into a central supporting wall for the 
entire southern section.  Snarling at the tigers he grabbed the bars and pulled.  Instantly 
the heavy iron bent outward, pulling loose from its moorings in the living rock.  He 
pulled again and it bent more, and then he shoved it to the side and out of the way, iron 
squealing.  A tiger leapt at him but one powerful punch not only killed it but flattened it 
against the far wall: were it stuck.  Another leapt and Samson caught it in his hands and 
holding the thousand-pound predator before him, pressed into its head.  The tiger roared, 
then struggled wildly, claws scratching skin but unable to cut through the corded muscle 
of his arms.  The tiger wheezed and whined and began to gag.  Samson pressed and 
twisted his hands and with a small “ungh” cracked the tiger’s skull so the skin sagged and 
limbs fell limp.  One more “ungh” and the skull collapsed and splattered the other tigers 
with brains and blood.  He snarled at the others and terrified, they scrambled out over the 
rubble to attacked weaker men.

Above, people felt the earth move and knew it was Samson who made that happen.  
Riotous panic spread and they threw themselves onto and past the legion, who couldn’t 
handle the mad dash and killed barely half of the those fleeing, many of them crushing 
their friends, relatives, employers to death with their own scrambling feet.  

Samson knew the immensity of weight above him, and felt that even he couldn’t actually 
move it.  He could, however, see if any inherent weaknesses could be found.  Setting his 
shoulder low, he slammed into the rock.  Only having the width of the cell available 
didn’t give him a lot of running room but his thighs powered immense energies into the 
fractile bedrock, which couldn’t long withstand the humiliating punishment Samson was 
dishing out.  Again and again he jetted his body against the wall, and the natural cracks 
and rifts in the stone closed, or spread, and the entire structure was compromised by his 
onslaught of muscle.  The blows began reverberating up, too, and loose stones and 
unsecured sections of archway vibrated, wavered.  The repetitive concussions caused 
walls to crack as they settled back into place only to be convulsed again.  And the longer 
he lasted, the stronger he seemed to get, piling force on force with eerily low-pitched 
grunts upon impact.

A top section of colonnade teetered and gave way, falling outward into the crowd.  
Vomitoria filled with panicked people collapsed, raining bricks down upon them, or 
raining them down into passages below amid smashed stone and concrete.  The rock 
couldn’t handle Samson’s power and cracked top to bottom beneath his shoulder and he 
saw his opening.

His shoulder flaring with pain, he stuck his fingers into the crack and burrowed his hands 
in to the wrist.  He pressed his pecs to the rock and began to pull.  No way he could 
actually do it.  No way any man could.  But … wait … a new crack expanded that ripped 
up into a new section like a lightning bolt, prompting the entire southern wall to collapse 
in a huge cloud of dust and rubble and blood.

Darkness surround him but Samson could see a few cracks of light.  Shoving rock 
tonnage out of the way with grunts he caused more avalanches before he finally climbed 
up to ground level.  The four-story arena was devastated, over half of it collapsed into 
rubble.  The wooden floor was a broken maw of splintered wood.  No one living and 
mobile was left, just the dying and the broken dead.  Screams throughout Antioch 
testified that some of the animals had escaped.  The dust and smoke from fires hung 
heavy amid the groans and cries of the dying.  A tenement block had fallen into itself just 
beyond the gaping crack Samson had pulled open in the street with his hand.  As he 
stepped down over the carnage into the street and made for the city gate, he saw an 
Imperial Page cowering.  He crooked his finger and his massive, tormented biceps 
twitched, swollen and sore.  The boy rose and approached him, eyes entranced by the 
muscle, and Samson, amused, made it dance for him.  He reached out to touch it and 
Samson let him stroke it, felt the boy shiver.  Then he looked him in the eye.

“Tell the emperor that all this and more awaits him when I drag it into Rome.  And tell 
him that if you are harmed for giving him this message, not a single Roman soul shall 
survive if I have to hunt them down from Libya to Britannia.  Go.”

The boy fled and hopping on his horse, seemed to squeeze himself into the saddle as he 
sped away.

***

Three imperial legions were waiting for Samson on the road in the gently sloping valley 
outside Ephesus.  His own cohort had been reduced by a third during the spectacle at 
Antioch.  Samson pondered his next move.

Due to his exertions, his muscles had grown in size and density over the past few months.  
His strength increased according to demand as well.  He knew that, alone, he could 
outrun the army.  He might even destroy a large portion of it.  Yet with so many armed, 
trained men, any number of them might get in a lucky shot.  His muscles were hard, 
resistant to the stones of the slingers, but they couldn’t resist sharpened steel or 
arrowheads.  So he decided he would simply prove who the only real man there was.

In his deep, commanding voice, he called the General Cornelius Macro to a peace 
council.  Each man’s guard bristled with weapons as they met at a tent pitched just 
outside the Roman camp.  They went inside, alone.

Macro was a seasoned veteran and a well-humored man, though he found his opponent’s 
reputation more than unsettling.  Samson sat at the table and put his elbow on it.

“Arm-wrestle?”

Macro chuckled.  “And what would that prove, that I’m an idiot?  History will tell if 
that’s true without additional help from me.”  Macro openly admired the arm.  “We’d 
rather not have hostilities.  We never do.  But my orders from the, uh, Emperor are clear.  
I turn you back or die trying.  Or die at his hand, which is arguably worse.”

Samson leaned back, the chair creaking under the weight of his muscles.  “There’s no 
love lost between you and the Emperor, is there?”  Macro remained diplomatically silent.  
“So how do we make everybody … happy?” said Samson.  He lightly fingered his cock, 
which immediately began to fill with blood.

Macro stiffened his back.  “That’s obscene.  You barbarians have no sense of decorum.”  
He squinted in distaste but saw the way Samson’s forearm rippled, the golden hairs like 
wind-blown wheat, as he manipulated his cock into semi-erect turgidity.  Macro gasped 
at its thickness and length … and then the sour musk rising from under Samson’s long-
hanging balls filled his nostrils and, involuntarily, Macro stiffened again.

His own, smaller cock angrily pressed up into his underwear and conflicting drives tore at 
him like wild birds struggling to escape.  He’d never so much as looked at another soldier 
with any feeling like this, yet this man….  Samson gazed languidly down at his throbbing 
veined manhood and lightly teased a thin, strong filament of precum out, out, out two feet 
beyond the end of the cockhead, still not fully aroused and arcing downward and slightly 
to the left with its own weight.  Macro breathed in and immediately coughed on the drool 
that had collected in his mouth.  Not looking up, Samson smiled a laughing smile and 
kept fingering himself, gazing raptly at his own greatness.  His pecs and delts twitched as 
his forearm rippled.  His massive peaked thighs and pointed calves flexed and bobbed 
open wider, revealing the size of the nuts sinking now beneath the thick tangle of golden 
fleece surrounding that boy-mast.  

Samson licked the come from his fingers and spat a thick gob into his palm and rubbed it 
along the glistening shaft.  The foreskin allowed the cockeye to peek out and hide again.  
Still not looking at the general, he said “I can go on like this for hours.  Can you imagine 
that?  I doubt if you can.”  Samson spread his arms wide into a full stretch, traps bristling 
beside his neck and shield-like pecs flattening wide yet still maintaining the square 
inches-thick shape above the stoved-in belly.  That cock continued to rise in little bumps, 
getting bigger, insanely longer, still thickening.  Macro could see Samson’s pulse in the 
spidery veins that fed the hungry cock with its blood power, a slow, insistent beat that 
doubled his own heart rate.  Bucking his hips into the air Samson flexed his cock and it 
slapped back against his abs with a whip-crack that made the Roman flinch and bite 
through his lip.  

Samson rotated his hips and flexed glutes released a pungent scent of their own.  Samson 
slowly, lazily looked up at the sweat running down Macro’s face.  Macro was touching 
himself through the leather apron of his dress armor.  Samson shook his head with a 
pursed mouth and Macro stopped.  Samson chucked his chin and bared his teeth, flaring 
his nostrils like a wild horse.  Macro dropped to his knees and approached the cock that 
now rose above his head where Samson sat.

His mouth was barely wide enough to fit that massive mushroom cockhead that once 
inside pulled him up off his feet with its strength.  He stumbled and clutched at Samson’s 
ridged and furrowed thighs, unable to force the cock back down.  It dragged up him and 
his neck bent to accommodate the steep angle of its erection.  Macro felt his lips split at 
the side as Samson forced more of it in.  He gagged and started to vomit but the meat in 
his throat prevented anything from rising.  The general strove to relax as he felt his 
esophagus expand.  He started to turn blue, and powerful hands moved his head away and 
he looked up at Samson with the pleading eyes of a starving prisoner in the deepest pit of 
hell.  Samson grinned coldly, lifted him up and flipped him over.  Holding him in the air 
around the waist, he entered and fucked the general, whose own legs flexed and dangled, 
and feeling the strength of the arms that held him and the power of the manhood that 
invaded him made him come twice before Samson was through, still not having come at 
all.

“I think you know what you need to do,” said Samson.  The general, his face purple with 
heat and covered with tears, and sweat and drool that wouldn’t stop gushing over his 
bloody lips, shouted hoarsely, “Sabo!  Come!”  And Samson’s man-by-man conquest of 
the three Roman legions at Ephesus had begun.

By midnight, the entire officer corps had been shattered and slavered with Samson’s 
constantly-flowing precum, and they knelt before him, asses bleeding and dicks raw and 
flaming in agony as his magnificence forced them into new hardness after each orgasm.  
Most of them were shooting blanks by now, but still Samson withheld his precious load 
and their stomachs twisted with desire.  He ordered them to assume their dignity and 
command their troops, century by century, to appear before him.  The men protested with 
shouts of betrayal and cries for mutiny until Samson appeared and barked his command 
for silence.  Some authority in his voice brought them all to a halt, and the officers 
sweated and trembled.  Samson roamed among the men to find the strongest, biggest 
warrior, and looking into each man’s eyes to assure them of his utter dominance, and the 
futility of resistance.  After searching thousands of hardened and callow men, he found a 
Gaul named Timotheus who was his height, with a proportion and thickness of muscle 
and a handsome face that had previously been admired by all, and grabbing him by the 
stiffening cock, led him out in front of the crowd.

Pointing at the vertical pike rising a foot and more off his loins, he said “This is your new 
legate!”  Flexing his right biceps into an even denser muscle, its high, knotted peak eerily 
shaped like the quivering cockhead, he said “This is your general!”  And suddenly 
pounding his fist against a marble pec with a thunderclap he shouted “And I am your 
GOD!”  

He placed his hand on Timotheus’ back, and at first the soldier resisted, but his muscle-
back couldn’t hold out long, and Samson soon bent him double and plunged into harder 
and harder.  The Gaul groaned and grabbed Samson’s wrists.  Samson leaned over and 
said “I’m not going to stop until I’m done.”  The Gaul hissed “Harder!”

Roaring with laughter Samson’s sixteen year old monster cock began jisming shots into 
the Gaul’s intestines that he could practically taste.  Filling the hole until it began to 
squeeze out with each new thrust, Samson pulled back and turning to the officers, began 
pumping long ropes of come at them, splattering and criss-crossing their bodies with the 
heavy white juice and breaking the sky with his bellows.  The army roared their approval.  

When the officers had been nearly mummified and struggled to stand beneath the weight 
of come, Samson turned and began taking on the legions.  The orgy lasted all night and 
into the next day, Samson wearing the men out ten at a time and still his rippling abs 
powered semen out or withheld it at his whim, leaving them screaming for more.

While the men slumbered through the next day, and medics set strained limbs and 
soothed aching assholes and blistered pricks, Samson planned his next assault.  He knew 
word of this would reach the Emperor in time, and the Emperor would have no choice but 
to up the ante.  Taking stock of the armaments and supplies now in his possession, and 
studying official dispatches in the general’s tent, he began to devise a way to drive past 
the next wave of resistance.

These plans were interrupted by the rousing soldiers desire for games to celebrate their 
new god-leader.  Many of them were too injured to participate but there were still races 
and wrestling and other events.  Samson decided to show them his athleticism wasn’t all 
cock and boast.

The main camp was situated to the east of the city, on the silt plain that built up between 
Ephesus and the retreating shoreline over the past nine hundred years.  Samson 
approached a log on which weapons rested.  He knelt down and put his elbow on it, as if 
to arm-wrestle.  The men backed away from the mass of bicep facing them; even relaxed 
it was bigger than it ever had been.  His forearm was now bigger than most men’s upper 
arms.  But he simply chuckled.  

“Hook up your two strongest chariot teams, with charioteers.  They shall test themselves 
against Samson’s mighty right arm, and I will judge your ability to serve me.”

Some men thought he was insane; others, more rightly, feared the outcome.  Two teams, 
Red and Green, were brought forward, and heavy catapult ropes were attached to the 
chariots, then tied around Samson’s wrist.  He knelt on one knee, and twitched his biceps 
a couple of times.  Then he said “Go!” 

The charioteers cracked their whips and eight horses lunged forward – and neighed 
loudly as their harnesses cut into their bodies.  His arm remained rigid, and he began to 
pull them backwards.  The drivers cracked and stung the horses and they dug their hooves 
into the ground, rose up in the air and came straight back down, unable to so much as 
bend that iron arm their way.  Samson wasn’t even breathing heavily as the horses raged. 
He pulled them inches back as he brought his arm down.

Pain of the lash and the harness fired new spirit in the horses and they rhythmically 
charged.  The combined might of their legs and fury straightened his arm.  He looked up 
with surprise, and suddenly grinned.  He flexed a little harder to increase the tension, and 
felt their united strength pull his arm back up, and then back a bit.  The inches gained fed 
the horses’ hopes for victory, yet nagged: all their power had only yielded this little bit.  
Samson’s lat and delt bulged, the muscles from his shoulder to his ass twisted and grew, 
and he brought the two champion teams to another halt.  

The ropes meanwhile twisted and frayed from the strain.  Hairy spines of broken fibers 
began to rise over their stretching lengths and Samson began to worry that the ropes 
wouldn’t last the contest.  He decided to end it now by sharply pulling down, bicep 
gleaming: but just then the red team, terrified at the stalemate, bolted forward, and the 
sudden tension snapped the rope.  

The crazed team ran out of control.  The other team saw them go and raged anew, but the 
loose team went tearing through the camp, destroying everything in its path.  The chariot 
flipped and smashed, throwing the driver to his death.  Samson leapt over the log to stop 
them.

The four Red horses ran like one swift beast, crashing through tents and armories, 
trampling men.  Samson smashed through the wreckage after them.  Green, suddenly 
free, stumbled forward and bolted as well, but tried to run off in a different direction.  
The charioteer steered them to keep up with Samson, fearing for his life.  But Samson, 
striving to reach Red, was slowly pulling ahead of the Green stallions.  And they were 
still attached to his wrist.

His arms pumped and his legs powered him faster and faster, but the soft silt earth 
hampered him.  He had to pump twice as hard to get up to speed.  He was ten feet from 
the Reds when the Green rope went tight: and he didn’t slow down.  He kicked faster.

The battle chariot twisted sideways until the wheel snapped, spilling the driver but 
keeping the main body of the car intact.  The man screamed but only a moment.  The 
horses screamed too: they couldn’t keep up with the Man.  The yoke uniting them at the 
end of the line hit the back legs of the outside horse and it fell, dragging the others down 
with it.  Samson ran faster, flexing his bicep and jerking the splayed and tangled horses 
through the wreckage after him.

The terrorized animals screamed as their twisting bodies caught on broken poles and 
smashed through barriers, bucking and flying and plowing into the earth, compelled by 
Samson’s turgid, constantly pumping arm.  Limbs snapped, hide ripped, teeth flew.  They 
just cleared the edge of the camp when Samson reached the flopping yoke of the Red 
team and gripping it, locked his knees.

Immediately a spray of earth flew twenty feet into the air.  The Reds felt the drag and 
tried to run faster.  Samson flexed his body and bent his back, snarling in rage at their 
resistance to his mastery.  Their legs clawed the soft earth as they lugged harder, still 
struggling against the pull, forelegs rising higher and thrusting down.  Samson twisted the 
reins and contracted his bicep, the green team, now dead or dying, skidding along behind 
him on the slick sled of their own blood.  He reached that arm forward and grabbed the 
yoke, and with both arms yanked back against the champion stallions’ flight.

They slowed more but strove harder.  They dragged forward yet his strength quickly 
sapped their theirs and the horses found it tougher to keep going, impossible to maintain 
speed against his raw man-power.  The lead horse stumbled and fell, and Samson 
straightened his legs and enforced his will upon them. The horses had to obey.  They 
collapsed.

Three were dead, bloody froth streaming from nostrils and ears.  The lead horse lay on its 
snapped legs, and Samson walked up to, still dragging the grisly Greens.  Standing before 
the panting horse, he grabbed that rope in his free hand and pulled against his own wrist.  
His forearms turned into Indian clubs and his lats flexed farther and farther out from his 
body.  The few inches of rope between his hands twisted, and stretched: and rope that had 
withstood the pull and drag of four horses couldn’t stand against the strain of his two 
battling biceps.  Twine by twine it broke until it finally snapped.

He bent over the horse and grabbed its head in his hands.  He rose up, dragging the horse 
with him, and looked with stern disapproval into the stallions eyes.  It tried to buck away 
but Samson held it fast, and simply glared at it until its chest heaved and its broken limbs 
flinched with the heart-attack of terror and went limp.  Samson walked back to camp.

Summoning the priests, he told them to offer the horses as holocausts to Jupiter.  The 
priests protested that it would sacrilege to offer pre-slaughtered, rebellious beasts, and 
Samson put his hand on top of the chief priests head and slammed him down so hard his 
body shaved in half over his two legs.  The priests got the point: he was their god now.  
Samson walked through the ranks and killed a dozen oxen with a single blow of his fist, 
instructing the men to feast and repair themselves for sailing to Rome.

***

Samson was torn.  On the one hand, he was eager to fight in the arena again, the 
emperor’s great amphitheater.  On the other, he wanted the emperor to live in dread of 
that day, and to draw the suspense out as a form of exquisite torture.  On a third member, 
he didn’t want the emperor to die before he got there.  His joy was based on frightening 
the same emperor, not some newcomer.  He greedily consumed an entire roasted ox on 
his own, tearing the meat off the limbs with his gnashing teeth.

The fleet of his conquered army remained at the port off Pion.  Only one ship sat in the 
sea channel of the constantly-dredging harbor.  Samson’s feast was interrupted when 
word came: the trireme was making a break for it.  Samson saw the sails raise and 
charging the port, leapt into the water just as the enormous rock was being winched up.  
He dove below and smashed the rock into fragment with three blows of his fist – 
underwater – and as he swam back, dragged the chain with him.  Men struggled at the 
turnstile to keep lifting but Samson’s arms and back forced them backwards until the 
handles broke and the men flew overboard.

Three levels of oars went into the water and the sails bulged with the offshore breeze. 
Samson climbed up onto the dock and pulled the chain until it was taut.  Suddenly a 
strong gust filled the sails and the drumbeats filled the air as dozens of oars stroked as 
one in the water.  Unable to secure a footing on the smooth stone, he slid back toward the 
water.  The officers on board cheered.

That pissed him off.  He turned around and slung the heavy rust-encrusted anchor chain 
over his shoulder; barnacles smashed against the dark muscle.  With grunts he planted his 
feet and the stone cracked; he commanded his thighs to ripple forward.  The chain 
tightened and twisted; he held the boat.  But he wasn’t content just to do that.  

He took a step inland.  He took another.  Unaccustomed to titanic pressures, stone caved 
under his feet.  The ship began to heave now on the waves as the straining oarsmen 
churned the water and forced the ship to bounce up and down.  Waves caused by the oars 
splashed higher and higher against the dock.  The Male stepped forward again.  He put 
out his foot and dragged body, chain and ship backward through the water.  

A sail ripped.  The mainmast creaked under the pressure and the main deck began to 
crack around it.  The whip masters worked frantically to keep the slaves from trying to 
break their own chains to escape as they heard the storm-weathered man-of-war groan 
and snap.  Hundreds of muscles cramped and tore as they defied real muscle.  A mast 
snapped and ripped through the heavy canvas of the mainsail.  The mainmast broke its 
mooring under the increased wind and tore planks up on the deck.  Splinters shot out like 
darts, piercing the eyes and wearied muscles of the galley slaves.  Still they stroked in 
futility against the Man’s brute power, feeling their tendons strain and muscles rip as 
payment for their forced defiance of Him.

The ship crashed against the stone dock, bulkheads splintering.  Officers were hurled 
onto the ground and into each other.  Without the masts, Samson’s strength advantage 
returned and spinning around, began to drag the boat ashore hand over hand. Biceps 
bunches and peaked as it tilted against the side of the quay.  He pulled again, laughing 
savagely, and the ship tilted farther, its own weight causing the side to cave in.  The ship 
listed up into the air, the keel now dripping as he yanked and men, chained and free, fell 
into the bulkheads and tangled together with shattering wood and falling equipment.  

The huge ship now lay on its side on the dock and walking backward, Samson dragged it 
across the cracked stonework and up onto the beach, wood scraping and splintering and 
crushing men.  “You dare try to escape this muscle?” he bellowed and the men froze.

Grabbing the twisted where they jutted out from the deck, he contracted his arms and 
pulled them out, ripping out the decks along with them.  Men cowered in their chains and 
these he spared by killing them fast with single blows.  The sailors, though, he rounded 
and let them take their arms.  About twenty men in all remained alive.

“You have one choice: to defeat me en masse.”  Without another word they moved 
forward shakily with swords raised.  He grabbed the main mast and heaving the 
enormous timber into his arms, swung it at them.

Hundreds of pounds of wood swinging at you makes you step back.  In this way, he 
herded the men back against an retaining wall for the port’s temple to Neptune.  They put 
out their hands, bracing backs and legs, as he pressed the hug log against them.

Forty strong arms and forty sturdy legs pushed outward but Samson’s two arms and two 
legs propulsed forward and their arms bent and the wood crunched into their bodies.  
They screamed and struggled.  Samson’s biceps’ peaks bit into the wood, boring deep 
depressions into the oak has rigid calves and a rock-hard virgin ass drove those man-
muscles against the softer solid oak.  The men’s cries turned to groans and sobs, and then 
to burbles of blood as the one Man present ground the mast against them, flattening their 
bodies.  Bones bent and fracture, bowels burst and each man died choking on his own 
blood.  Eyes popped from sockets and ears burst as his final thrust brought the wood 
within an inch of the bloodied stone wall.

The priests ran out protesting the sacrilege of murder so near the temple and pelted 
Samson with rocks from above.  Samson casually tossed aside the huge mast with its 
biceps-impressions, and examined the retaining wall more closely.

He found what he was looking for, cross-support beams built into the base of the temple, 
just above his head.  Digging out some stonework with his thick fingers, he climbed up 
and stuck his huge feet into the holes.  The ends of the beams (carved with Nereid heads) 
now poked into his shoulders and he could see the temple base proper above the edge of 
the wall, marble steps rising up from the travertine base that rested on these crossbeams.  
He put his hands on the beams and shoved up.

His back was flat against the wall so he knew this would be all shoulder and arm strength.  
He wanted to show the god and his little priests the source of true power.  Stones tinkled 
loose around the edges.  Biceps grew, pregnant with power; claw-like delts swelled and 
extended.  The beams heaved up an inch and stones shuffled against each other with a dry 
scraping sound.  He began to sweat in the hot sun.

Holy implements began to shift and roll as surfaces took on one degree of tilt, then two.  
Samson’s precarious perch channeled immense strain into his hips, and his calves split 
angrily as his knees locked to force the strain up into the building itself.  He dug in with 
his toes and raised up with his arches, and the structure teetered up another inch, another 
few degrees.  

Priests chanted loud prayers, not believing one man could lift such an immensity of piled 
stone and the massive bronze statue of the god.  Yet the creaking beams beneath their feet 
and the nauseating tilt shattered their calm.  They reached for railings to support 
themselves but Samson grunted and raised his trembling arms against the mass of hewn 
marble and made columns sway.  Things began falling to the ground and rolling, a crack 
opened with a horrible sound in the steps, and near his face chunks of rock fell back into 
the bed between the rising timbers. 

Samson was breathing hard now, the battles with the horses and ship having sapped his 
strength. Oily sweat drenched with sexmusk poured from his pits and balls and ran from 
the long barbarian hair that splayed like rays against his burgeoning traps.  His back 
writhed like a snake pit of pythons.  His arms engorged with blood and rose more erect as 
he willed them to.  His biceps, now semi-stretched, peaked purple over the raising arms.  
His joints and tendons screamed.  He suddenly felt like he could lift no more.

His arms dropped slightly and the priests stamped their feet in triumph and their chants 
turned to prayers of thanksgiving to the god for vanquishing this foe and his evil hubris.  
Samson breathed hard, his abs rapping against the stonework, and his aching arms sank a 
little further under the immense weight.  The temple groaned as it settled back into place.  
The priests mocked him and jumped up and down to increase the pressure on his red-
splotched delts.  Grieving at this failure in his strength, he felt the building settle more 
and the beams begin to slip off his sweaty palms.  He set his jaw and closed his eyes.  

Banishing the pain and exhaustion, he sucked in a deep breath and his face went calm.  
The priests still crowed and jumped.  A small knitting of Samson’s brow and shallow 
frown is all that the movement he made for a moment.  Then, suddenly, his tortured arms 
shoved the structure up a foot.

Things rattled over and part of the roof slid off its support.  Clay tiles spilled into the 
market beside the temple and Neptune teetered and slid on his base.  Samson’s arms 
shoved again, a burst of Olympian power that made shots and cracks ring out.  The 
priests wailed and stamped their feet, falling flat on their faces as the tilt increased.  
Suddenly the steeply-angled beams had enough.

Each cracked from the pressure like volcanic eruptions and suddenly the stonework base 
sagged inward.  Outer columns toppled, and the huge bronze god within groaned and fell, 
his head smashing through wall of his cella.  The roof caved in and priests screamed and 
ran as the holy fire caught the timbers.  With on final thrust Samson drove the beam-ends 
up, propelling the high side of the temple over onto itself.  Marble cracked and rolled and 
collapsed into the market next door, capitals flying into the crowd and crushing trapped 
shoppers and animals.  Huge keening cries went up as the temple raised a blooming cloud 
in its disintegration.  And Samson climbed shakily up to the top and kicked his way 
through the wreckage.

Staggering over to the column-drum littered god, he tore away the wall fragments and 
shoved the huge marble segments off.  The seated god was canted over on his head, and 
raising his exhausted arm, he piled it down into the god’s huge face, denting its right 
cheekbone and eye inward.  Again he struck and bent the thick cast bronze into itself, and 
again brought his fury to bear on the helpless metal god.  The face deformed beneath his 
pile-driving fist, sinking down into a hole.  Then those tortured, tumescent arms lifted it 
back upright, and dragged it over the stone and heaved it up onto a horrendous eruption 
of marble where the front steps had used to be.  Turning to address the people, he 
declared in a husky voice full of the strain from his many exertions that day, “This is 
what your god is good for.  It’s good for a real man to beat to a pulp.  Worship that if you 
care to.”  Shoving over one last column stump, he marched off to his camp and fell 
asleep.  Men swarmed over his body, slurping the sweat with their tongues and caressing 
the unresponsive member that was never truly soft, but now heavy and pliable like some 
holy serpent.  Soon, though, after he had been fully cleaned and left, it rose on its own 
and he fingered himself in his sleep with a smile.

***

Early the next morning he embarked quickly for Tarentum, taking only what material was 
undamaged from the horse-wrestling catastrophe and preparing his troops for a light, 
swift march up the Italian peninsula.  He told them his goal was to take every city in his 
wake away from Rome and continue to build his forces.  But in truth he had another plan.

The voyage was spent by most of the soldiers in a state of delirium, as Samson swam 
from boat to boat and continued to impregnate the men with his fiery seed.  For fun he 
would race the boats across the open sea, slicing through the heaving waves at speeds 
even the fully-manned oars and straining sails could not meet.  At times, the craving for 
destruction was so strong he wished to founder the entire fleet with his fists and move 
swiftly to Rome alone; but he knew the men would have their use, and by now he was 
almost addicted to thousands of different throats and tongues laboring around his cock for 
hours on end.  

They reached the heel of Italy in two days’ time at full sail.  Assembled just off the shore 
to prevent their entry into the heart of the empire were five full legions, with war 
machines and siege engines, three blocking the coast and two behind, ready for a rear 
assault.  His legend had preceded him.

Mooring the boats out of catapult range, he dove into the water and swam beneath it, not 
surfacing until he was two miles down the coast.  He rose from the sea like the real 
Neptune and swiftly raced into the hills.  

He found a huge boulder atop an outcropping overlooking the field of battle.  The armies 
ranged in both directions, back to back.  His boats rode anchor at the horizon.  It took 
only two shoves to loosen the rock from the earth, and he heaved it overhead, loving the 
feel of his arms sneering at gravity.  He stood there a solid hour, just to show the earth it 
couldn’t outlast him.  Then, like some Herculean shot-putter, he cupped it in his right 
hand and thrust it up into the air.

The two-ton stone rose almost straight up and kept going up before the spin his mighty 
arm shoved into it made it arc toward the armies.  As aimed, it came down (about ten 
minutes later, and covered in ice crystals) directly between the two, smack on a tower of 
archers, driving it into the ground with an impact crater ten feed wide and filling the air 
with powdered wood, blood and dust.  Under this cover he jumped off the cliff and 
landed with a thud the army felt in their teeth.  

The exceptional army turned toward the thud and had pike-launchers in place just as 
Samson was in range.  Slingers filled the air with stones that merely smashed against his 
denser flesh.  The pikes fired as the dust still settled.  Two six foot long pointed oak pikes 
came dangerously close to Samson: except that he caught them. His arms and lats bulging 
briefly as they absorbed the speed and weight of the missiles, and contained both.  He 
spun them around, reared and threw them back at the line, faster and harder than they’d 
come, smashing through the machines that launched them and into a line of infantry.  

Arrows were launched but now he was at close range.  He ran so fast, punching and 
swinging his fists, that men ended up firing upon or stabbing each other.  With only one 
attacker, who wouldn’t stay still and was just a blur, the army had to turn on itself.  The 
swath of crippled and face-pulped men ran like a twisted snake through the cohort after 
cohort until he found himself face to face with a mounted legate.  The general raised his 
sword and Samson hit his horse from below, crushing the animal’s ribs into its organs 
and sending it feet off the earth.  The man flew off and leaping faster, Samson straddled 
the man and shoved the palm of his hand into his breastplate.

It wasn’t hard enough to kill him but he metal crumpled beneath his strength in a way 
that prevented him from breathing in.  Gasping and flailing, he tried to undress himself 
but Samson picked him up in one hand by crumpling the lower breastplate and 
embedding his belly fat among the twisted metal, and hurled him into the line of cavalry.  
His own men sliced him to ribbons as they charged: but Samson was nowhere to be 
found.

Instead, horses screamed as their back legs were splintered or ripped loose from their 
hips.  Men fell into each other and suddenly a hooked rope was missing from the 
seigeworks.  It flew through the tumult to the top of another stories-high war tower and 
went tight: Samson’s arm pulled and the vast weighted tower groaned and creaked as he 
pulled it over, huge posts bending and snapping.  Samson tugged once more and the 
entire contraption fell into the legion, a vat of flaming fat for arrows splattering over 
dozens of men.  Running in panic, they began to spread it along the ranks. 

The army was soon in rout but had no where to retreat to but out, away from its own 
center.  Yet Samson appeared everywhere, anywhere, nowhere.  Samson gave the signal 
for his ships to come forward: a hoarse bark that his lungs powered over every other 
sound and brought a temporary silence to the battle.  Catapults moved to launch toward 
the boats but Samson battered his way through the ranks toward them.  He came to 
another tower of archers and hammering his fist into one edge, shattered the wood and 
left it creaking and listing slowly over.  

He reached the catapult ranks as they were firing on the ships.  Two men operated the 
winch machinery, huffing as the mechanism multiplied their strength enough to slowly 
bend the thick bole down.  They arms shook with the pressure as others loaded them and 
hit the release.  The catapult thwacked up, slowed somewhat by the unwinding line.  
Samson felt he could improve their range. 

His fists created ammunition, hitting skulls hard enough to turn brains to mush with the 
shockwave, but leaving the skulls themselves intact, if fracture.  He twisted the heads off 
the bodies with sickening cracks and built a pile.  His hands easily snapped the ropes and 
smashed apart the winch mechanisms to create more room for boles to bend.  Men rose 
against him but he flexed his biceps and bellowed and those that didn’t flee crapped 
themselves, hard-ons raging. 

Barking commands to the awe-struck host, he had them gather the dripping heads in their 
arms and prepare the torches.  Grabbing the two catapult ropes, he pulled down, his 
symphonic back rippling as the huge boles bent down under his power, creaking and 
popping as he bent them faster and lower than they ever had before.  His biceps bloomed 
and seemed larger than the heads which he instructed the men to pile into the cups.  The 
bent logs shivered from the strain of attempting, and failing, to resist those arms.  The 
heads were covered with tallow and set aflame, and Samson let go.  The released boles 
sprung up and literally cracked in half as they hit the supports.  Even so, only one batch 
of heads splattered into the foredeck of the foremost ship.  Samson knew that wouldn’t 
do.  He could further improve their range, more crudely perhaps, and only the one time.

Moving swiftly, he flexed and herded the confused and scared soldiers up onto the 
catapults themselves.  Soon a dozen devises were covered with fifteen or twenty men, 
holding onto it and each other.  Samson then grabbed the base of one and heaved it up to 
his chest.  Men scrambled and fell and he growled for them to hold on.  The war machine 
creaked in his arms as he thrust it overhead, and steadying it, hurled it in a huge arc over 
the ocean.

The screaming machine flew across the water and landed smack in the middle of a ship, 
smashing the decks and splintering down through bilge.  The ship seemed to crack in half 
and men jumped into the sea.  Moving quickly and promising a worse death to any 
deserters (to be impaled on the end of his cock and ripped open slowly), he swiftly hefted 
and flung each catapult out to sea before the ships could pull back out of range.  Only the 
last one missed, and that narrowly, because it was oaring away; but since Samson doused 
the last few with tallow and lit the men alive before hurling them to their deaths, enough 
flaming men hit the deck and sails to set it afire.

In the meantime, the ships had fired flaming arrows at the men ashore.  Now the final 
ships were approaching for the assault and the full battle erupted between the armies.  
Smashing skulls and chests on his way back inland, Samson fell behind the army and, 
pausing a moment, watched the two forces consume each other.  They seem to have 
forgotten all about him, as men in a sudden firefight will.  Laughing, he began running 
north.

***

Commodus heard the latest report of the rout, and the absence of the Sarmatian giant’s 
body among the carnage made him dizzy.  Fear and fury clouded his mind and he ordered 
everyone to leave him.  Men grateful to leave alive scurried away and left the emperor 
alone in his garden.  He felt as if destiny itself were stalking him.  He’d thrown his full 
power against this man and not only had he slipped through, he’d broken that power into 
bits, time and again.  There were no legions left without abandoning the frontiers; only 
the Praetorian guard and vast fortifications stood between him and his steadily 
approaching death.  It all seemed pitifully weak compared to this one man.  Yet he 
resolved to plumb the limits of craft in dispensing with this threat, and he still had a few 
tricks up his sleeve.  Nonetheless, as he sat in the shade of the laurel tree, sweat coursed 
down his body.

***

Samson reached Rome the morning after the battle, while Commodus still sat in his 
garden plotting.  He covered his now massive, still growing body with rags, since no 
peasant’s clothes taken along the way could accommodate the breadth of his shoulders or 
the girth of his thighs.  He wanted his first appearance to be a surprise.

He walked through the crowded, distracting forum undetected, his brain reeling with the 
size and number of buildings crowding on top of each other, and the mass of people 
constantly running into him.  He wanted to kill them but resisted in the name of making 
his grand entrance.  At the end of the forum stood the vast Temple of Saturn and, higher 
up on the lower peak of the Capitol itself stood the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, 
towering above the others.

He mounted the steps like a supplicant, taking a moment to allow its graceful, 
monumental beauty to disturb him.  Inside it was crowded with statuary, war plunder of 
works of art from all over the empire.  He passed a side-altars to Hercules, and gaped into 
the cellae of Juno and Minerva that flanked the statue of Jupiter which seemed to fill its 
space with a massive divine presence.  Yet his desire to destroy beauty burned more 
brightly than the hot sun, and slipping around the tourists, he worked his way behind to 
the enormous gilded bronze and ivory-limbed statue of the Father of the Gods.  A god 
who, like himself, had killed his own father.

The priests, worshippers and tourists noticed nothing until a strange groaning occurred 
that made everyone look up at the wooden, gilded roof.  They  saw the seated god rise up 
from his pedestal, and at first it seemed as if it had come alive with the god himself.   
Then a powerful voice, young but deep as the flooding Tiber, shook the columns 
themselves.  

“This is what you worship?  This mass of metal and dead bones?”

The people gasped when they saw a man, a single man of heroic proportions, holding the 
statue above his head.  Arms that seemed like connected globes of throbbing flesh lashed 
together with veins supported the tonnage.  Pecs spread out and forward, glistening in the 
firelight: and suddenly he tossed the statue UP.  The head of the god crashed into the 
ceiling beams, cracking them and bringing a rain of gilt splinters down upon the fleeing 
people.  Samson laughed and caught it, his knees sinking almost completely under the 
weight.  The outstretched ivory arm broke off the bronze body and cracked in half on the 
ground.  Samson’s legs shook and straightened up.

“See how easily his arm is defeated.  From this day forth you will worship a man of 
living muscle and unbreakable bones, whose arm is stronger than any God!”  At that he 
heaved the statue forward.  It pulverized the cella wall and tipped forward, hitting the 
mosaic floor face-first, crushing priests and skidding through the temple.  Statues toppled 
and smashed as it kept sliding until the head hit one of the massive bronze columns 
commemorating the victory at Actium, knocking it over.  Samson immediately sprang 
onto the god’s back and wrapped his carved arms around the gold-painted bronze 
forehead.

Straining his back and grunting, he twisted the head up with a shriek of inches-thick 
bronze bending and tearing.  He growled and bent the head back further, a huge hole 
opening in the god’s throat.  Gold dust burst off and coated Samson in powder that 
adhered to his sweat and made his bulging musculature all the more regal and 
compelling.  As the head was forced back further, the crushed gore of a priest appeared to 
have smeared Jupiter’s solemn face with brains.  He tugged back more and wriggled the 
head side to side, shearing off solid metal until his bare hands had twisted the head free 
from the body.  This he took out onto the steps where onlookers had crowded to see what 
terrible thing had caused the horrendous crash within their greatest shrine.

The crowd parted in awe as the gold-caked boy-man descended the steps dragging the 
head of the god to the altar that stood below.  Slinging the huge bronze weight, Samson 
slammed it down on the altar, cracking the marble in half, the head ringing like a clarion 
of doom.  The heavy metal of the face had been twisted and mangled by Samson’s bare 
hands into a scream, mouth warped and eyes stretched wide as if in actual suffering.  He 
turned to face the crowd.

“I am your only living God, and all sacrifices that I take I will take with my own hands.  
Tomorrow in your great Colosseum, I defy your Emperor to bring any force that can stop 
me.  Then I will challenge him, the reputed Hercules Romanus, to a duel to the death, for 
the rule of the Empire!”

The Praetorian guard rushed him but stopped, seeing the depth of his pecs and the way 
the muscle folded over a corrugation of abs that seemed impervious to any weaponry.  No 
man would strike first.  Samson walked back up the temple steps and, ripping some 
chains loose that guided sightseers among the splendors, carried them back to the front of 
the temple.  

With a whip-like snap he wrapped the heavy chains around the base of two central 
columns.  With click, thick fingers he bent and twisted the iron links together, and 
stepping forward into the sunlight, his arms stretched behind him, began to pull.

The intricately engineered construction of this constantly rebuilt temple was designed to 
withstand all the lightning strikes that continually lash against it.  The columns stood firm 
as Samson’s pecs, still an inch thick in their greatest stretch, trembled and rippled like 
living shields.

His biceps stood up like bricks, his triceps perfect half-circles of power-meat below.  
Veins on his forearms rose an inch above the tangled muscle and Samson breathed 
deeply, sucking his abdomen to an almost child-like circumference.  His abs were lost in 
the shadow cast by his chest.  His legs resembled those of beasts as they split and 
expanded.  Someone screamed as she saw his elbows were now slightly bent.

The chains trembled with shocks but the iron held.  Silence fell over the crowd and 
suddenly, above the heaving breaths of the closed-eyed giant, came the distinct scraping 
sound of some Olympian weight being forced out of place.  The scraping grew louder and 
Samson’s biceps began to peak like thunderheads as they distorted to a size larger than 
his own head.  The thick tendons connecting to his forearms stood out like ropes and the 
scraping became a sorry grind.  The golden boy smiled and opened his dark, green eyes, 
scanning the crowd hungrily as they worshipped in terror or in open masturbation his 
brute, conquering strength.

The columns pulled farther forward and suddenly Samson slowly, steadily raised his 
hands up to fully mound his pecs.  The two columns sighed and toppled inward, the 
drums separated and fell, and chunks of marble spun down the stone steps and bashed 
into the crowd, smashing heads and erect cocks at random.  The huge roof creaked 
forward and down and the pediment cracked, toppling the terra-cotta four-horse chariot 
from the crown.  Tumbling stones fell and hit Samson’s back and shoulders, only to 
bounce off and crush others.  

He turned and was disappointed that the temple hadn’t collapsed; it was better built than 
he thought.  These Romans are clever, the thought.  I’d better keep my wits about me.  

Whipping the chains around the middle of two next columns and yanking hard, his back 
rippling before them like the Tiber at flood, he pulled the middle drums out of alignment 
and left the columns teetering, ready to fall.  “That ought to keep ‘em busy,” he muttered 
as he turned and made his way down the steps, kicking broken boulders out of the way. 
Hundred-pound fragments flew into the crowd that had backed away but hadn’t 
dispersed, unable to take its eyes from the boy even under the threat of death.  Behind 
him he heard the crippled temple sag and moan.  The Praetorians fell back and allowed 
Samson to walk into the forum, down the Via Sacra, toward the grand Flavian 
Amphitheater and its enormous statue of the Sun.  He disappeared into an archway and 
the darkness beyond.

***

Rome exploded with the news of Samson’s arrival.  Urbanites dismissed the stories of his 
conquests as country naivete and superstition; gladiators lined up for the battle and 
animal owners flooded the amphitheater basements with beasts whose devourment of this 
so-called Samson would accrue great credit to their owners in Commodus’ eyes.  Samson 
himself, after quickly learning the complex layout of the alleys, cages and lifts beneath 
the arena floor, found the imperial tunnel that linked the underground chambers with the 
imperial residences on the Celian hill. 

The two guards were easily disposed of.  Samson twitched his massive pecs and watched 
their eyes widen as his nipples flattened beneath the mounds that extended four inches 
farther out.  Then he relaxed the thick plates of flesh and, picking up stone nearby, set it 
on the nearly-level surface so the men could fully appreciate them.  He put the rock 
between those pecs and flexed; it had to crack.  He flexed harder and ground it into gravel 
between them.  His cock rose, sniffing incipient triumph, and immediately the men, each 
married with children, fell to the mast and began hungrily cleaning the road grime from 
beneath the foreskin and the almost impenetrable mass of golden hair covering his balls.  
He held their heads together and began filling their mouths with ropy come.  They tried 
to back away, then flailed their arms trying to grab that monster cock as it proceeded to 
suffocate them with its unceasingly sticky flow, but nothing their fists or fingers could do 
in any way hurt that organ.  It thrived on their squeezing and beating and soon come 
spurted out their blue noses and ears even their tear-ducts.  They twitched and passed out.  
He dragged them into a dark changing room and left them to die.

Walking along the dark passage he saw a connecting tunnel that led into the ruins of 
Nero’s Golden House, now buried underneath Trajan’s still-new baths.  He decided to 
explore this subterranean structure, to kill time the way he enjoyed killing everything 
else.  Wandering in the dim shadows and listening intently to the plash of water and 
murmur of conversation above him – about him, too, he believed – he looked in 
amazement at the stripped but no less grand structure that had once housed another 
emperor worthy of embracing death.  In one room he was startled by a figure:  another 
intruder?  No, it was a statue, unlike anything he’d ever seen before, not just a somber 
official man with comically enhanced muscles but a tortured, naked man with straining 
muscles like his own, only of course smaller and less dense, being marble; and two 
children struggled beside him.  They were being crushed by giant snakes, and their faces 
of grief and terror pleased Samson no end.  

The stone man’s curled bicep and massive chest aroused the human giant, and he grabbed 
his cock and began squeezing it with pressure that would choke a man or snake to death, 
but which fed his cock with pleasure and anger.  It rose and swelled and in a few strokes 
he brought himself to climax, hitting the stonework with sudden ejaculate so hard the end 
of the marble arm and snake-head cracked off and fell to the ground.  How typical, he 
thought, that even the rock versions of themselves can’t stand up to the power of his sex.  
He coated the statue in thick-dripping manmilk and left it in disgust.  Confidently he 
walked through the dim light back to the imperial tunnel, and into the bowels of the 
imperial residence complex.
 
Guards were thick in the corridors above him.  When a contingent passed, he reached up 
to a grating of iron bars woven together into the floor.   His fingers wrapped around the 
middle and he contracted his bicep, and the hard cold metal instantly creaked like wood.  
His arm pulled down and all the bars bent down, some cracking the stone that anchored 
them.  The helpless metal groaned as bent, having born the weight of countless running 
soldiers but unable to withstand this teen’s heavier arm.  He twisted his wrist and the bars 
tore free along with chunks and gravel.

He laid the mangled grating down and crouching down, leapt up into the passageway.  He 
had no idea where he was in the basement of the complex, or where Commodus might be, 
so he found a shadow near a busy intersection to listen … and wait.

It didn’t take long to pick up palace gossip and know Commodus had locked himself in 
his bedroom and guards were posted outside, allowing only the most known and willowy 
pages through with food.  The passageways bristled with spears.  Not that that bothered 
Samson in the least.  But he wanted to give Commodus time to stew.

Near midnight he made his move.  Most of the palace staff had retired and he was able to 
get to the main hallway leading into Commodus’ bedroom undetected.  He passed the 
moonlit peristyle and stood in the torchlight at the end of the hall as the guards realized 
what they were seeing, the flickering mass of pec and delt muscle, face shadowed by the 
largest arms they’d ever seen on a man.  He shoved those arms against the walls.

The concrete holding the bricks together cracked under the pressure, as did the bricks 
themselves.  Shoving into the wall like he was breaking a snow bank, he spread cracks 
further and further until the entire roof fell in on top of the men.  Then Samson walked 
over the rubble and ground it into them beneath his feet.  One tried to jab him with a 
broken spear but Samson grabbed it and, seeing the man trapped beneath a large stone, 
hit the stone hard enough to crack it and smash his legs.  The man screamed and Samson 
battered in the bronze doors that protected the emperor in three blows.  

Commodus, thinking it was death itself, cowered on his bed as the boys waiting on him 
tried to hide … and then hide their jerking off at the sight of Samson.  The brute walked 
slowly to the emperor and towered over him.

“I could kill you now as easily as I killed your armies.  But I want you to dread me even 
more.  I promised you could throw anything at me you dared, and I will keep that 
promise.  But when I defeat them all, you must face me.  And I think you know how that 
will end.  Until tomorrow, then.”

He grabbed the wooden post of the bed and squeezed it, splintering the precious wood 
and dropping the canopy over the cowering man.  Fresh guards scrambled through the 
rubble and Samson returned to the bronze doors that twisted inward on their hinges, and 
bent the squealing metal back up.  Then, gripping a coffered panel in each door, he 
squeezed them together until the metal overlapped, creating a lock that they could only 
flail against.  Turning to the rear of the windowless room, Samson raised his arms and 
brought them down against the wall.  Its extraordinary thickness withstood this first 
assault, though pulverized brick dust filled the air.  Growling lowly like an earthquake 
preparing to strike, he raised his arms and smashed down again, blowing brick fragments 
down the side of the hill into the houses below.  Wandering back south toward the 
imperial fora, he listened to the restless trumpets and roars coming from the Stadium.  He 
found an alley that led into the poor Suburra district where there was a fire destroying a 
brothel and vendors selling meat on a night when no one could sleep.  He gathered 
together those who might pleasure him and, evicting a man from his house, began the 
orgy.

***

A sun-bathed Samson stood in the empty arena peering up into the throng.  Over 70,000 
people had crammed into the stadium, many standing on the highest level and hanging 
onto the tarpaulin poles for balance at the dizzying height.  Samson drank in the 
applauding, jocular crowd and knew they would soon be vomiting in their seats.

The producers had built on his name and created an army of Philistine Warriors.  A boy 
ran out with the jawbone of an ass as a kind of prop and, when Samson refused to take it, 
threw up his hands and dropped it at his feet.  The crowd laughed and Samson, relishing 
how soon their reaction would turn to horror, let the boy live.  He stepped on the bone to 
smash it into the sand and wiggled his fingers for the “Philistines” to approach.

The hundred men spread out to surround him as he knew they would.  Samson sped 
among them, a blur of pure energy, zigzagging and banging their heads together hard 
enough to crease their metal helmets and crush their skulls.  Men sliced each other while 
Samson punched and crushed his way among them unscathed.  He caught swords and 
squeezed the blades, folding the steel in half in his mitt and bending it back.  Some 
fighters recognized the rout and tried to flee but Samson somehow always stood before 
them, crushing chests and punching through their abdominal walls to rip their guts and 
sometimes their entire spine out before their eyes.  Looking over their shoulders in fear 
they ran into his hard body and staggered backward, and he stepped on their heads.  Or he 
would catch a raised arm between his pecs or shoulder blades and squeeze it to pulp 
before their horrified eyes, amazed at how muscle could chew their flesh to pink liquid.  
Soon the hundred gladiators had been reduced to a handful that stood, cowering, back to 
back and waving what weapons had escaped Samson’s steel-warping hands.

Samson cocked his head sideways as if deciding what to do.  The men shuffled and wept 
in the sun, dazed by the sea of carnage around them.  It had taken only minutes for this 
man armed only with his two arms to demolish hardened warriors.  Samson crouched and 
sprang into the air, up, up, impossibly up, and soon descended directly for them.  They 
scattered as he hit, cracking the thick arena floor in.  Samson sprang and managed to 
gather three heads in his arms.

Hands struggled against his forearms but he simply contracted his biceps while they 
choked and kicked and with sickening crunches broke their necks, and by just twisting 
his shoulders, worked their heads off their bodies.  Blood spouted from one who hadn’t 
been quite dead.  He turned and faced the astonished crowd, then hurled the heads into it.  
The decadent crowd screamed in joy and clamored on their seats for more.  Samson was 
surprised at their capacity for him, and knew there was more in store.

The last three were furiously banging and pulling on the secured gates, trying to flee. The 
gatekeepers simply laughed and poked them with pikes.  The first felt Samson’s hand on 
his shoulder.   Then he felt the blinding pain of fingers inside his shoulder, digging the 
bones apart from the joints.  Samson spun him around and dragged him out into the 
center of the arena and held him just an inch off the ground.  The man gibbered and bit 
his tongue with the pain and Samson got a spray of blood in the face.  He frowned and 
bent down the man’s breastplate, snapping the leather straps and lacerating the body 
beneath.  The metal squealed as it rolled up under his hand.  Samson dug his fingers into 
the man’s chest and felt for where the right pectoral attached to the sternum.  He set his 
grip, then ripped the quivering wet muscle right out through the tearing skin.  

The man shrieked and passed out until Samson ripped out his left pec and tossed it to the 
hungry crowd.  The man bolted awake to gape in shock at the bloody absence of his 
chest.  He could see the heaving ribs and the sternum, which Samson was now working 
his fingers beneath.  Samson tugged once, then twice, then tore the man’s breastplate out 
of his body while he watched.  By this time he was in seizures, urine and shit flooding out 
of his body.  Samson reached into the cavity and gently lifted the stuttering heart and 
lungs away, yanked loose his esophagus and shoved sand directly into his belly, then 
hurled him end over end into the stands.

The legs of the other two were already streaked with shit and urine by the time Samson 
turned his fell attention to them.  He caught one as he tried to dodge away, and hauled 
him into the air by his shoulders.  Staring him in the eye, Samson pressed the shoulders 
together, shoving the man’s arms into his body and bending the collarbone until it 
cracked and stuck out through the skin.  The man feebly kicked at the boy but Samson 
kept compressing him sideways until his shoulder blades overlapped and his ribs, bent 
beyond their strength, broke and tore open his flesh.  He shrieked his voice raw until he 
simply heaved air, his face distorted into a rictus of pain.  Samson worked his way down, 
folding him in half lengthwise until his jerking shoulders and hips touched each other.  
The man’s mouth still hung open in a silent wail, and Samson ripped off the mandible 
and shoved it sideways into the hole: then kept shoving and shoving until his hand hit the 
bottom of the man’s abdomen, then using the teeth, slashed the man’s balls off from the 
inside.  They plopped into the dust as the still-twitching corpse lay accordioned up 
Samson’s arm, bones spiking out through his crushed armor.  He dropped the jaw through 
the hole, then swung his arm around and around until the corpse flew off into the crowd 
and exploded against the steps.

The last man became unhinged, defiantly grabbing two swords which he swung wildly.  
Samson walked up to him and caught the slashing wrists with such force the swords flew 
off into the sand.  He gathered the two wrists in one hand, and caught the writhing ankles 
in the other, and for a moment appeared indecisive.  

Samson smiled and raised his eyebrows at Commodus.  Commodus shrugged, 
uncomfortably.  Samson winked, and squeezed the wrists and ankles to pulverize the 
bones and constrict the joints small enough to fit easily in one fist.  He looped the man 
up, which caused the armor breastplate to stick into his skin.  With the other, he put his 
hand on the shrieking, bouncing warrior’s bent back and started pushing up.  The 
resistance was more mechanical than muscular, and Samson’s huge muscles writhed as 
he forced the back to flatten.  Shoulder and hip joints popped and bulged grotesquely 
even through the costume.  But then Samson kept pushing his back in, and slowly the 
breastplate began to bend as the body was forced up into it.  The man’s ululation of terror 
increased to savage howls as his legs and arms bent and snapped.  Ribs began jutting 
through the skin as the body scrunched between his palm and the bending armor.  With a 
jerk the spine buckled and snapped and the man’s face went white.  Samson had bent him 
now roughly into quarters.

Deftly manipulating the nearly two hundred pound still-living body in his hands, he 
flipped him around and placed his hand against the shoulder/hip portion of the man and 
commenced to wad him up like a towel.  He cracked and pressed until bones shot out, 
then broke off the sharp ends of the bone, shoved it into the soft flesh and kept mashing 
the flesh.  He kept wadding and wadding and mashing flesh, bone fragments, armor, 
leather, chainmail and cloth relentlessly into itself, dexterously working his arms and 
hands to crunch him, compressing steel and bone alike into a ball-shaped mangle.  The 
crowd gaped in awed amazement, equal parts violent nausea and awe at the muscular 
beauty of those arms and pecs and shoulders shaping the inhuman orb.  Only the bulging 
head flopped loose until Samson, crouching to keep the ball against his thighs, one arm 
wrapped around the girth of the monstrosity, pushed it down inside with a wet THWOP.  

“Catch!” he shouted as he threw it straight at the emperor.  Guard rose and impaled the 
sickening creation on spears but couldn’t prevent blood and a loose intestine from 
spattering onto their “divine” leaders face and robe.  Commodus narrowed his eyes and 
commanded the next battle.

The Hebraic Samson had strangled a lion, so the Sarmatian Samson would face five.  
Having been whipped into a frenzy before being released up the ramp to the surface, the 
pawed at each other and spread out.  But someone got the signals crossed, because 
immediately behind him a door opened and out lumbered three very hungry bears.  

The animals all growled and smelled each other.  Their eyes showed them a human, who 
ought to have been the weakest, but their senses warned them he was far more dangerous. 
The lions ranged out in pack formation and the bears backed away, bellowing.  Samson 
ignored the lions and, suddenly running, hit a bear in the head with his own.

The bear staggered back, tongue lolling.  Blood matted its fur and stung its eyes.  Its own 
blood.  The other bears charged and Samson grabbed one by the claw and snapped it in 
the air like a whip.  Every vertebra popped loose from its joints  Its powerful claws 
scoured his thin skin, filling the air with his blood scent, but the muscles hardened and 
the claws couldn’t pierce them.  Samson grabbed the bear’s thick neck and plunged his 
fingers into its body to grab its pelvis, and he, a man, proceeded to wring the living bear.  
Bones twisted loose and popped, ligaments severed and blood vessels ripped looses from 
meat as Samson’s massive arms tortured the animal into a grotesque, screaming, blood-
spurting spiral.

The third bear came from behind but Samson tossed the distorted bear into the stands and 
whipped around, grabbing the charging beast in a bear-hug and stunning it as it impacted 
his solid pecs at full speed.  Its thick fur hid his arms that quickly broke bones and 
destroyed heavy bear muscle.  In less than a minute he had the bear gasping and flailing, 
carrying and squeezing bolts of compressing agony into its man-eating body.  Its mind 
reeled at being the hunted, and helpless in the arms of its prey.  Blood shot from the 
animals ears.  Samson grabbed one leg and twirling the near half-ton beast around over 
his head and spraying the senatorial rows with blood, he flung it up over the edge of the 
amphitheater, taking out a tarpaulin and sending it into the streets.  The crowd outside the 
stadium screamed in awe.

The first bear rose unsteadily up, towering a foot above him, and Samson punched it in 
the chest so hard it flew twenty feet back, into the archers behind their net.  They 
screamed and it tried to claw them but couldn’t catch breath, Samson having punctured 
its lungs with his fist.  The stunned bear fell forward and grabbing it around the head, 
Samson hefted it upside down into the air and pile-drove it through the planking of arena 
floor.  

When he ripped it out, the head tore off and fell onto the yelling gladiators below.  He 
hurled the headless corpse at the lions, who scattered and regrouped.  Samson picked the 
massive bear-body up with one arm and swung it up into the stands.  The lions took that 
moment to spring, but Samson was prepared.

He ducked and rose swiftly back up underneath a leaping lion; it hit his back and 
rebounded, winded and stunned at the impact.  Another jumped with paws outstretched 
and he grabbed them and began spinning the lion around and around until its forelegs 
disjointed.  He hurled this into the farthest wall of the arena where it killed an archer with 
its enormous weight.  Two more came from behind Samson but his fists were faster and 
their skulls caved inward, spraying blood.

Someone released a python.

The two remaining lions, one having only witnessed his power, the other having felt it 
firsthand, came at him from different sides, slashing their paws in the air.  He roared back 
and they refused to attack.  He charged them and they ran away and he laughed.  He 
walked over to the crippled lion that snarled savagely, and picking it by its mane, shook it 
in one arm, harder and harder it became a blur of yellow fur.  He dropped it, dead.  Then 
he backed the other two into the narrowest ellipse of the arena.

They tried to scatter but he was too fast, constantly moving in front of them before their 
instincts could handle it.  Disturbed, frightened and confused, they continued to feint but 
he herded them relentlessly with superior instincts and the overwhelming stench of his 
ball-musk.  When they crouched, roaring side by side, slavering with fear, he charged 
again pressed them back up against the wall, one in each arm.  Their limbs flayed and 
clutched at him and the air and he felt a claw break off against his back.  With small 
grunts and three quick jerks he collapsed the chest of one, pressing it into the stone wall 
where it slid slowly down on a trail of blood, then let the other scamper away.  This he 
hunted, crouching.  It backed into a pylon and Samson sprang onto its back, wrapping his 
arms around not only the chest but the forelegs, and pulled.

The animal’s giant head swiveled in pain as its bones cracked under the boy’s golden 
strength.  He spread his lats to cover the lion from the view of the crowd and let them 
marvel at his power as he stood hunched over, grinding the man-eater to death in his bare 
arms.  He squeezed his legs together and pulled the lion up to jolt the back legs out of the 
hip-joints.  He reared up and shook the lion, its ribs hideously troughed around his arms, 
its head flopping helplessly.  When at last blood burbled around its swollen tongue and 
blew out its nostrils he dropped it, raising his fur and blood spattered arms in triumph.  
But he wasn’t done.  He dug his fingers into the scalp and in one steady strain, peeled the 
skin off the meat, ripping the hide loose and holding it, dripping, before the crowd.  He 
flung this at Commodus’ feet, shouting: “Here’s a new lion skin for Hercules Romanus to 
wear.  The other one’s kind of gamy.”  The crowd screamed in derision.  The emperor 
fumed.

Again the jaded crowd chanted his name, Samson, Samson, thinking somehow the 
animals must have been drugged.  So he waited for the python.

It crawled for him and immediately began encircling his body with its thick muscular 
coils.  He let continue until he was fairly well wrapped and its head came close to his, and 
opened to bite.  Just as it was ready to strike he took a breath in the constricted tight space 
that caused the snake to actually loose its grip, JUST FROM HIS CHEST EXPANSION.  
The python looked shocked.  Samson tried to burst his hands from his sides.  The coils 
stretched and the snake’s eyes bulged: nothing in its entire species’ history had prepared 
it for such resistance.  The snake closed its mouth and struggled to tighten further, 
keeping Samson’s hands trapped at his sides.  He felt his breathing become slightly 
labored with the building pressure, and he curled his lip at the snake.  It hissed and 
slapped him in the face with its tongue.  Samson flexed his lats and pecs and felt them 
come up against the complete encircling pressure.  His feet slowly slid together and he 
knew he would fall and be humiliated before everyone.

The python again opened its mouth to sink its small fangs into his face and his panic of 
humiliation and confinement fired through his body: he shot his elbows outward with a 
blood-curdling cry and sent chunks of python meat and blood and bone up into the 
audience.   The snake’s cold head hit the Emperor’s knee.

Now, that couldn’t have been faked.

A bit winded, Samson now faced two gorillas goaded up by long torches, big heavy man-
like beasts who screamed and beat the ground and their chests.  Samson screamed back, 
pounding his own pecs with a kettle-drum boom that made the giant apes jump up and 
down, baring their fangs.  He stared right into their eyes, daring them to attack, and the 
biggest one did.  It charged him and threw its chest against his, bouncing back while he 
stood there, having absorbed its speeding eight-hundred pound bulk without flinching.  
The other ran up and pounded the ground, then its chest -- and Samson pounded its chest 
with a punch that ruptured the muscle and sent the beast flying into the archers along the 
side.  The downed ape rose and threw its arms around Samson’s arms and chest.

Samson grimaced at the fetid stench of the animal’s rotten breath and felt fleas jump onto 
his body.  He jammed his thumbs into the gorilla’s sides, puncturing them.  The animal’s 
squeezing had no effect and now, in pain, it let go: and Samson grabbed the arms and 
pulled the animal closer to him by bending those arms backward.

The giant monkey roared and tried to resist, but Samson’s greater arm-muscle steadily 
worked those powerful limbs back.  It tried to bite him but Samson head-butted it, 
cracking its skull and concussing it.  Its pecs tore loose from the shoulders as he forced 
the arms together behind the gorilla’s back, and it shrieked as joints shattered; its legs 
tried to reach around his but his knees could not be buckled as the human boy broke the 
great ape’s elbows by twisting the formerly powerful arms.  

Dropping it and kicking the wounded beast from his shins, he walked over to the other 
that still gasped for breath by the wall.  Picking it up by the scruff of the neck he hoisted 
it into the air with that one arm, then brought it back to the other one, picked it up and 
held them both in his own mighty pythons for the crowd to gape at.  Then he smashed 
their heads together so the bone caved inward, so fast and hard the bone pulverized and 
he mashed the beasts together neck to neck, forcing skull and brain down into the chest 
cavities.  He cast them aside and, facing the emperor, panting but tingling with strength 
and pleasure, spat and called up:

“Is that the best you can do?”

No other animal owners wanted to risk their prize investments so Commodus ordered his 
private rhino released.  The giant, half-blind stupid beast trotted out and stood swishing 
its tail.  It had killed numerous gladiators for Commodus before, and expected calmly that 
it would again; except its nose was assaulted by the smell of carnage like none other.  
Samson turned away for an instant to sneer at Commodus when the rhinoceros charged 
him with amazing speed, and turned back just in time for the rhino to hit his abs with its 
one big horn.

The rhino’s force actually knocked Samson back two steps, which surprised him.  But the 
animal fell to its knees after impacting those abs, groaning, its heavy horn openly 
cracked.  Samson didn’t wait for another attack.  He jumped over the animal and grabbed 
the thick overlapping skin that was almost bone tough, and pulled.  The animal rose and 
tried to get away but Samson held it in place so that its feet merely pawed at the sand.  
His arms trembled as they tore strips of heavy skin off its body.  The beast screamed, a 
sound no one had ever heard, and smiling grimly Samson folded more hard skin into his 
fist and wrenched it loose from the bucking giant’s muscle. 

The rhino pawed the ground trying to break free of Samson’s bare hands but he kept 
tearing, and the armor-skin TWOCKED off in chunks, each time accompanied by an 
inhuman wail of wretched pain.  His fist concussed the animal’s head to quiet it down 
and he kept peeling off huge gore-soaked panels of living hide and hair.  Red-glistening 
muscle writhed the raw hole and Samson plunged his hand through the throbbing 
muscles, forcing them aside and, grasping the spine, ripped it up.  The animal stopped 
screamed once and then made a soft sighing groan as its legs jittered, but Samson wasn’t 
done.  He surveyed the spine-bones arcing up above the body, and stuck his hand back in 
to the elbow until he found the animal’s heart and tore it out through the rhino’s back.  

Holding it aloft, he proceeded to eat it as the hideous carcass lay sprawled and twitching 
in the hot sun.  Commodus retched and ordered the stampede.  A large gate opened and 
dozens of huge horned bulls came racing into the amphitheater, straight for him.

He first considered using the rhino but decided he needed something longer.  He 
slammed his foot down through the dense wood floor and bending over, ripped up a 
plank about twenty feet long and six inches thick.  Sand blew like a storm into the stands 
and the horrible cracking of all that wood bending and breaking as his biceps bulged 
terrified and thrilled the audience.  He swung the board around and just as the first bulls 
hit.  He shoved back hard as could while his feet skidded backward.  

The bulls closest to him took the stun but the force of all those cattle drove Samson back 
ten feet and the crowd stomped and whooped to see him struggle.  He planted his feet and 
pushed, only to have his arms bend as more bulls piled into the arena and the force 
multiplied.  They continued to push him until his scrambling foot fell through the hole 
he’d just created.  He went down on the other knee and felt his arms begin to quiver as 
they raised above his head to prevent the trembling.  He arched his back; the bulls pushed 
him to the end of the hole where he lodged, his hard ass crunching into the splinters.  He 
tensed his muscles and brought the bulls to a stop.

Steers continued to be goaded and forced into the stream and Samson rose up, feeling his 
footing slip again.  He rent the air with a snarl that brought a new wave of hush over the 
crowd and forced the bulls back a few inches.  Their huge necks arched and they pawed 
at the ground and pushed him back again, but he shoved and shoved and made the living 
mass move according to HIS will.  The struggled continued for agonizing minutes of 
back-and forth sliding and scraping, more bulls piling in meeting a tighter, harder, bigger 
ball in his curled arm and deeper crevice between the two continents of his back.  Archers 
fired at the outside of the herd to keep as many as possible from slipping around the 
barrier, and he continued to shove and get shoved back, barely gaining a foot overall.  

The animals, driven by pain and herd panic, drove harder, bucking and gashing each 
other’s asses with their horns, increasing their pain and fury.  They shoved Samson back 
over the ground he’d gained and he stomped into the arena floor, cracking shallow, shaky 
footholds and knowing they couldn’t be relied on a second time, lunged into the animals 
with all his roaring muscleforce.  His back swelled to two bull-widths and his arms grew 
purple and spiked with veins as he dropped his head beneath those meat-coated shoulders 
and took a step into the teeming, living flood.

The bulls bellowed and cried, and the middle ones began to be crushed between the two 
ends of increasing pressure: more bulls behind and one man before.  He refused to give a 
up single inch, crunching the heavy floor beneath him.  His calves split and leveraged 
power that crippled the bull’s legs, breaking knees.  The herd compressed and arrows 
created a bank of dead bulls that wouldn’t break.  Hooves pawed and scraped vainly as 
Samson’s thighs and glutes thrust against them.  The board creaked but held as Samson 
spread out his arms along its length and stepped again and again into the crushing herd.

Bulls broke up and dropped, fell onto their backs to be trampled and Samson’s 
overwhelming might compacted them impossibly back.  The iron grating sealed off the 
arena and living bull-meat began to squeeze through the bars. Caught now between the 
walls and the Samson, the bulls screamed and bucked.  Their ribs cracked and lungs burst 
from the pressure, and blood began to jet and spray into the sand and the Romans.  Eyes 
popped out and moaning sighs filled the air.  Still he pulverized them with quicker, 
harder thrusts and now the broken bodies spilled sideways up and over the banks as he 
created a juggernaut of rupturing meat and splintering bone.  Even after they were all 
dead he continued to crush them until the board finally cracked in half lengthwise under 
his pecs, and when he stepped back, limbs quivering with near-exhaustion and soaked 
with gore, the board remained imbedded in the wall of slaughter.  

Hooves and horns and bones stuck out at all angles from the towering mass that sealed 
off the end of the arena, rising up to block the lower seats.  The sound of people vomiting 
and gagging filled the air.  Samson roared hoarsely:

“Who’s laughing now?”  

Not Commodus.  In less than an hour Samson had destroyed one hundred gladiators, five 
lions, three bears, two gorillas, a rhinoceros, a python and a herd of bulls en masse with 
his bare hands.  He stood there, defiance itself.  The emperor gaped openly at the stooped, 
trembling but heroic figure glaring at him from below.  Could he outlast everything?  
Commodus felt his cock twitch.

Samson could barely raise his hand to his forehead to wipe the sweat and blood from his 
eyes, and his bloated dense bicep nearly didn’t allow his hand to reach in.  He heard a 
gate creak rustily up behind him.  The crowed gasped and chanted the final challenger’s 
name, the unbeaten Kind of Gladiators (unbeaten except, of course, in mock-battle by 
Hercules Romanus).  “Death.  Death.  Death.”  

Samson felt the tremors in his legs as Death walked in behind him.  He heard the floor 
groan and thought it was another elephant.  Turning, he saw, at the far end of the 
amphitheater, something that made him blink and shake his head.  He’d never seen 
anything so vast in his life.

Death was eight feet tall and over a quarter ton of glistening, sculpted black muscle from 
the southernmost reaches of Libya.  He’d butchered his way up the contest circuit out of 
Carthage and through Spain and Gaul, and snorted at contempt at this northern horseman-
merchant who adopted the name of Samson.  He’d break the man in half over his arm.

Still, when Death’s eyes adjusted to the glare, he was disturbed at the wall of bullmeat at 
the other end, and the shocking amount of dismembered animals and men littering the 
arena floor around the stooped hulk who seemed an only slightly smaller, paler version of 
himself.  Had he done all this?  Yet clearly he was just a boy, phenomenal perhaps, but 
raw, and destined to learn more about manhood in the moment of his death than all he’d 
known in life.  He strode over the complaining planks to finish this grisly business.

Every muscle in Samson’s body was bloated, firing with pain and cramping with 
exhaustion.  Two boys ran out with amphorae of water which he drank and poured over 
his head to freshen himself, then crushed to dust in his hands.  Even that was an effort.  
He blinked in disbelief as the brutal foe grew bigger than was possible the closer he got.  
He straightened up to full height and realized he was staring directly into the gently 
rolling crevice between the giant’s pectorals, a space deep enough to fit his entire head.  
The abs rose full inches off a waist shrunk smaller than his own; they were as big as 
glazed roofing tiles and twisted menacingly with each step.  The arms were nearly as big 
as his own mammoth thighs, and the legs rivaled those of the elephants he’d defeated.   
And the face, painted into a white death mask with gaping, arrogant nostrils, was as 
beautiful as any he’d ever seen.  He blinked and when he opened his eyes, the man was 
gone.  He began to wonder if it was a halluc—

Suddenly he felt his arms pulled back behind him and hot breath searing the top of his 
head and peaked traps.  Immense pain thundered through his shoulders and back in the 
wrenching moment.  Instinctively he jerked away but an overwhelming force conquered 
his strength.  He felt his pecs stretch with the shock, his shoulders strain and his biceps 
pull against his bones.  He brutally tensed to drag his arms forward: and nothing 
happened.  Death chuckled, and spitting into Samson’s hair, flexed his own eye-defying 
pecs and crunched Samson’s arms farther back.

Never had the Sarmatian boy experienced pain on this scale and his panic outpaced his 
anger.  He pulled and struggled but remained helplessly bound by dark Libyan muscle.  
Death dragged him up in the air by his arms and pounded him down into the arena floor.  
Samson locked his knees and blew chunks of wood down, sinking in up until his thick 
thighs wedged, and with a contemptuous grunt the giant yanked him out again.  Samson 
strained but Death forced his hands together and tried to crush his wrists.  Death wanted 
to break those arms but he was breathing heavily already; his own arms began to feel the 
strain.  How could this boy’s arms, smaller than his, contain so much power?  Starting to 
labor just to hold on, his trembling arms swelling with fury and veins and death-dealing 
muscle, he felt the boy actually pull his arms back out.  They struggled together a 
moment, sweat beading already on death’s brow as the boy fed his fury with pain.  Death 
realized Samson’s bones were iron-hard, his tendons tough and he weighed a hundred 
pounds more than he looked.  But nothing was stronger, and no man bigger, than Death.  
So he released the boy with a kick to the ass that sent him sprawling face forward into the 
blood-spattered sand.

Samson felt his face scrape on the wood and sand got into his eye.  He let stinging sweat 
flow in to wash it out and rose to his knees, hearing the crowd caw and mock him, more 
eager for his blood now that he had sickened –and thrilled – them with his prowess. 

Samson stumbled to shaky feet and blearily saw the giant standing, fists on his hips, 
laughing in deep booming derision.  Samson staggered forward and blindingly slammed 
his fist into the Death’s abs: only to feel his wrist almost shatter.  Agony blazed up his 
arm and exploded in his brain.  Death laughed harder and patted his belly.  Samson 
swung around and kicked those abs as hard as he could, and what would have killed any 
living thing merely made the Libyan bend a little at the hips.  Truly it knocked the wind 
out of him but the showman didn’t reveal it.  Samson’s knees buckled with the searing 
shock, and though his joints were tough enough to withstand it, it was the closest thing to 
being broken he’d ever experience.  He fell to the ground and grabbed his knee, howling.  
Death bent over to stare him in the face.  As Samson slowly rose, he socked Samson’s 
jaw, sending the boy flying ten feet onto his ass, and skidding five more.

Samson tried to clear his brain but suddenly the giant was over him, thighs big as 
mountains enveloping his body and pressing down.  He struggled for breath and pushed 
his hands vainly into the arching, distended columns of muscle that extended down his 
body.  His head knocked against something obscenely enormous coiled under Death’s 
loincloth but he couldn’t twist his head around to bit.  The legs paralyzed him, cracking 
bones like a giant nut.  He couldn’t budge.  He pounded the legs but only bruised his fists 
until his fingers sang in pain.  But he flexed his body and strain as he might, Death 
couldn’t crush him.  Samson continued to be able to breath, his muscles created a space 
for his diaphragm to move.  Death felt something strain deep in his thigh and pull up to 
his groin, and marveled at the pressure Samson’s chest could resist.  

Skidding around, he flung himself on top of the boy, arms under his and around his head, 
bending his head forward and cramming it into the dirt.  Samson’s dense traps fought 
back and his arms powered down but could barely resist the Libyan’s coal-black 
forearms.  Death’s legs spread out and he tried to squash him against the arena floor.  
Oak half a foot thick cracked beneath them from the pressure, bowing inward deeper and 
deeper.  Samson felt the man’s fingers unlace behind is head and suddenly the Libyan 
released him, flipped him over and grabbed him by the balls.  Jumping up, Death heaved 
him overhead, bringing him down upon his own shoulders.  Wrapping his other hand 
over Samson’s head, he tried to bend Samson like a giant iron bar around his neck.  
Samson felt his spent body betray him and obey the dark master, heard a roaring like 
blood in his ears, and knew his back was straining with all it had against the black man’s 
arms and lats and was losing.  The vast plain of creviced delts and traps bit into his 
muscles and he felt bruises bloom and spread.  But Death’s arms suddenly trembled 
wildly, and dizzyingly he hurled Samson up and slammed him down against his knee.

Samson had gone rigid and though the punishment made him groan as his hard muscles 
bent, Samson’s leg shot pain down into Death’s foot, which in turn cracked the planking.  
He thew the boy off with a gesture of contempt, and crouched a moment as if thinking.  
They rose about the same time and Samson looked up: and realized Death was playing 
with him because he couldn’t find a weak spot, and acting as if in control when he was 
starting to grow confused.  He could sling Samson around like a doll but the boy was too 
tough, was taking everything he could dish out, and wearing him down.  And, most 
happily, he felt his flagging strength surge the tiniest bit.

Death saw blood flush through Samson’s muscles and put his hands up for a test of 
strength.  Samson laced his fingers and their arms locked as each hand tried to crush the 
other to pulp.  Death tried to pull Samson off his feet but Samson remained rooted; the 
Libyan performer knew if he was seen to fail, the crowd would turn on him like a starved 
tiger.  So he tried to force Samson to his knees.  

The boy felt his knees strain and his back bend and he suddenly yanked the startled giant 
forward.  Death tried to let go but Samson grinned and jerked him again, hard.  Swearing, 
Death head-butted him, causing himself to see starts, but Samson let go and staggered 
back.  Samson raised his had to his head and Death clasped both hands to Samson’s bicep 
to crush it.  Samson sneered and hardened his muscle.  Death squeezed, feeling it 
engorge, feeling the second peak force its way up against those struggling black fingers, 
and savagely he twisted and ground the muscle back down into the bone. 

Samson felt the biceps contained and crushed back, and panic surged through him anew.  
He didn’t realize it took both the giant’s hands and all his leverage to perform this 
miracle, only that his almighty muscle was being squeezed and pulped.  He tried to jerk 
free and Death dragged him around into a chicken wing, forcing his hand up with one 
knee and increasing his pressure on that steel muscle.  Pain blinded Samson for a moment 
and instinct took over: and with a heedless yell that broke pathetically, he flipped Death 
up onto his back.

Nothing had ever lifted Death off the ground.  He whooped in surprise and tried to crush 
Samson beneath him but the boy staggered forward, and flipped backward, landing on 
top of him.  The arena floor cracked again beneath the muscle giants and Death muttered 
“I killed an elephant with my fist, boy.”  Samson growled back “I killed two.”  Samson 
wrapped his arm around Death’s head and tried to pull up a leg with the other one.

Death gasped as he felt his massive leg actually pulled up by the boys arm!  His jaw 
dropped when he saw that bicep peak, saw the forearm rival his thigh for its dense river 
of sinew.  Abandoning showmanship, he cried out and strained openly to lower his leg, 
marveling anew at the resistance as that stuttering arm opened out slower than it ever 
should have: he should have been able to rip it out!  With terrible punches that bruised 
the boy’s ribs, Death forced Samson to release him, and shoved him away, scrambling 
back.  The audience knew he was desperate, and that knowledge burned into his proud, 
undefeated ego.

Death leapt up and hammered a fist into Samson’s chest.  Samson staggered back and 
countered with series of punches to Death’s abs, ignoring the flaming pain, focusing on 
making the muscle quiver.  Death slammed his fists down into Samson’s back again, and  
again, and AGAIN, but Samson kept slamming away until Death felt his defenses 
beginning to weaken.  He kneed Samson’s abs HARD and the boy flew back, and raining 
dense blows Samson couldn’t resist, beat the boy back into a heavy pylon, which broke 
free of the arena floor behind him as Death’s fist-shockwaves rebounded out of Samson’s 
head.  Samson ducked and Death hit the top of the two-foot thick stone pylon, shearing it 
off.  Samson twisted his arm up and pulled it free with a resounding crack.  He felt the 
crippled arena sag beneath him and rammed the pylon into Death’s chest, driving him 
back until the tormented stone shattered between them.  Samson dealt a stunning blow 
between those pecs that sent Death reeling into the wall.

Death ripped down the netting and dug his fingers under a section of wall.  The stone 
scraped as his one arm’s force broke its mortar lifted it free.  He roared with triumph as a 
half-ton block of stone rose in the air, balanced, and flew at Samson.  

The boy caught it, stumbled backward and went down on one knee.  The arena floor 
continued to sag.  He rose, block overhead, and hurled it back at Death.  Death held up 
his arms and the solid rock cracked around them, knocking the man down as the quarter-
ton halves plowed into the screaming stands.  

Death jumped up and raised his fists to bring them down on Samson’s head, his face 
finally broken in hatred and rage.  Samson caught the fists and sank to his knees, and 
glimpsed again the extent of a cock so immensely out of proportion even with an eight-
foot quarter-ton giant, he got dizzy.  Death hauled him up and grabbed his own wrists 
around Samson’s lower back, pulling him a foot off the ground and crushing him deeply 
into his abs so that his tectonic pecs swallowed Samson’s head.  He drew a quick breath 
and tightened his entire body to crush Samson’s head between those mounds of nippled 
power as he had many a gladiator before, and grind Samson’s body into his own 
unyielding belly. 

The cock of Death began to engorge and forced Samson’s legs apart as it rose, aiming for 
Samson’s ass.  As if guided by its own muscle, he felt the head seek his sphincter ring.  
Samson felt pain explode up his spine from Death’s hands and pressure like an 
earthquake grind the plates of his skull.  He felt a cockhead beg as a bull’s skull begin 
forcing itself past his clenched sphincter, lubricating and massaging the muscles with 
precum as Death’s body utterly dominated and controlled the boy.  Samson felt himself 
weaken, felt something inside begin to turn toward the gut-ripping pain-pleasure Death 
was about it inflict.  Oily sweat drenched the titans and Samson, with a muffled cry, 
wrested his arms free of Death’s bearhug.  Securing one arm around Death’s lower back 
and flexing that bicep to iron-shattering hardness, Samson pushed his other hand up into 
the undenting solidity of Death’s pectoral muscle.  Nothing moved except a few vertebrae 
in his own back.

Death was gulping breaths, breathing hard, laboring to overcome Samson’s power.  His 
strength felt stretched to the utmost yet the boy seemed as hard as ever, his back barely 
caving inward, his tough skull making his pecs spasm.  Still, he smiled as his cock began 
to shove itself relentlessly through the boy’s defenses, stretching his asshole to its limit 
and beyond.  The great hooded monster made the muscles tear to accommodate it and the 
pain rigidified him like lightning, exploding in every muscle that violently fought back.  
He bore down on the impaling spear and shoved up against the living rock of quivering 
pec around and above his head.

Death suddenly felt his back begin to bend under Samson’s strength.  His eyes widened 
as he tried to resist but Samson bent him farther, his muffled cries coming clearer and 
more bloodthirsty than ever.  Death felt his cock squeezed back out as Samson’s guts 
tightened against its assault.  The boy’s glutes squeezed and agony bolted up that cock as 
something inside crushed flat; the gaping cockmouth spurted sudden blood into the boy’s 
crack and up his back.  Samson ground that cock flat beneath his iron ass cheeks and 
grimaced as he strained to overcome the larger man’s superior density and thickness, 
forcing him backward, farther, making those giant muscles obey his purple arms and 
accept their destruction.  He shook uncontrollably under the pressure he generated that 
slowly, so slowly, coerced those iron muscles into final submission.  

He realized his feet were wet, but thought it was Death’s blood or shit.  But the water 
kept rising.  

He never took his eyes off the rock-cliff underside of Deaths pecs as they arced away 
from his head, but he knew the roaring he’d heard was the Stadium being flooded, the 
Tiber pouring through sluices and now swirling up to their knees.  It burbled up in 
fountains through the cracks and holes in the stadium floor, turning the blood and meat-
covered sand to thick mud that began sucking down into the lower depths.  Samson 
roared in frustration as his footing slipped and with a final assault caved in Death’s 
mighty back Death until his spine snapped and immense muscles quivered and seized.   
And in his rage, he kept bending the body until the flailing, shrieking head plunged under 
the rising tide and was bent fully double over his arm.

For the first and last time in his great career, Death emitted a body-wracking howl of 
outraged pain and bewilderment, but it merely bubbled in the water; he sucked mud into 
his lungs and in his last act clawed at Samson’s face and crammed a finger in his mouth.  
Samson bit it off but before he could spit it out, tasted something strange, not like the 
nickel-taste of blood but bitter and granular, slide against his tongue from under the 
man’s fingernail.  He spat the digit into the giant’s face and felt tentacles surround his 
ankles.  

Death sank beneath the waves as some mighty force yanked Samson into the blind 
swirling hell of sinking mud and rising filth.  Samson groped for the tentacles and felt 
suction cups bit into his skin.  His fingers ruptured the suctioning limbs, ripping out 
chunks as more and impossibly more swarmed about him.  He kept tearing into the 
writhing, seemingly endless animal, feeling dizzy from the poison.  A gigantic beak-like 
maw bit down on his bicep but couldn’t close; he grabbed it and wrested the beaks back 
apart, breaking them.  Now the thing tried to swim away but Samson grabbed hold and 
reeled it in to punch it, only there was nothing to punch.  Leaving the blood and ink-
jetting beast he shot to the surface and hit is head on the floor.  He tried going the other 
way and rammed into a wall.  Samson finally bobbed the surface, his sight distorted with 
the drug and suddenly coughing, lay on his back in the rising flood, and darkness took 
him.

***

Commodus had slyly prepared for any eventuality.  The Tullianum of the Carcer, the 
cone-shaped dungeon of the main prison where most prisoners sentenced to private death 
perished, would never hold Samson.  Besides, that would have been grisly enough.  So 
Commodus had excavated out a hollow sarcophagus-like space into the bedrock itself, 
and wrapping the giant in chains, had half a dozen dwarves drag him in there.  Even at his 
most vulnerable, Samson’s might and beauty, and his own hateful sadism, prevented the 
emperor from merely cutting off his head.  

The long low chamber barely accommodated the bulk of the boy mummified in iron 
chain.  Furthermore, the chains were locked to iron bolts sunk into the bedrock; the 
dwarves worked their way out, and four strong men using levers replaced the block that 
sealed the chamber from light and air.  They climbed a rope out of the Tullianum, 
shivering with relief, and left knowing the boy would now awake and die in terror.

Awake he did, hours later.  He sensed first the hot, airless dark, smelled the dank of the 
lower prison complex built underneath the city’s main sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, which 
flowed with endless offal.  Trying to move, he found himself entirely bound:  panic such 
as he had never known blazed through him.  His fear of confinement had been realized in 
the worst possible way as he felt the roof of his prison scraping against the chains 
encircling his chest, a bare inch from his nose.  A high-pitched muffled scream escaped 
his chain-held jaws like the keening of far birds.  Adrenaline surged into every muscle 
fiber of his body and he jerked his arms and legs out.

Hundreds of pounds of fingers-thick link of iron clinked and twisted as expanding 
pressures tested their toughness.  Such resistance to his efforts fueled a rush of terror and 
thrashing that pressed links closed and fractured others.  Jerking in the narrow space he 
was able to move slightly more, the metal flattening and twisting around him, and he 
tossed himself harder and jerked and flexed.  The clinking and raw-voiced shrieking of 
the boy increased as his muscles began to balloon with blood and press into the spaces 
between the links, causing the iron to bend and twist away from him, flattening in a 
desperate attempt to hold together.  Yet Samson was more desperate than cold forged 
iron.

Bits of metal began shooting off with pings and ricocheting off the rock.  Locks twisted 
like robe, iron anchors bent and sheared off or pulled out of the rock.  Bucking and 
twisting his body, Samson warped and shattered the chain links … and got his shoulders 
stuck while trying to turn over onto his belly.  The space was too narrow for him to be 
sideways.  But now fear was welding into rage and in three hard bursts BOOM his legs 
moved and BOOM his arms shot out and BOOOOM weary iron surrendered to his 
power.  He furiously felt the stone, sensing stone all around; he couldn’t imagine how he 
had gotten there, he could only imagine how to get out.  He’d push his way out.

His cell was burrowed deep into the bedrock, past all masonry construction.  Loose iron 
flattened and broke beneath his arms and they pressed into the roof and floor of his cell.  
Such weight he’d never felt, like a mountain bearing down upon him.  His entire body, 
engorged with hormone-blazing blood, tried to sit upright.  And in the cells above him, in 
the main jail offices on the surface, things began to rattle.  His arms pressed out and 
cracks began shooting into the solid rock.  He began to shriek uncontrollably in his terror.

Grunting with fury, his head still wrapped in strands of broken links, he emitted short 
quick bursts of power that shocked into the structures above him.  The jolts increased in 
intensity and suddenly a brick wall bowed out and collapsed into the street in a cascade of 
bricks.  At first the Romans thought it was an earthquake, but there was no rumble, just 
harder and harder jolts as if the very ground were erupting.  

A crack opened in the floor of the surface level of the jail and spread apart.  The ceiling 
fell in, the roof collapsed along with it and the second story piled down into the first level 
of subterranean cells.  Other, deeper cells filled with prisoner awaiting trials collapsed 
into rubble, men screaming as stones crushed them: and Samson kept shoving the rock 
up, off him, away from his body.  And the titanic tonnage kept breaking under his muscle 
force.  

The people realized it wasn’t Neptune, but teen muscle that was cracking open the earth 
itself and terrified, aroused messengers raced to the emperor.  The orders were given to 
seal off the lower level of the prison by all the extraordinary measures he’d recently 
installed.  And thought he’d never need to use.  Meanwhile the shockwaves kept 
rupturing the ground and buildings collapsed inward in an ever-widening circle of 
destruction, like ripples in the stone-paved earth.

Samson felt huge weights batter down onto him as fractured rock collapsed on itself, its 
foundation shattered by his own muscle.  He battered back, clawed and pounded at the 
boulders, reducing them to ever smaller rocks and gravel.  He almost swam up through 
the rock to the lowest hallway of the real prison, and climbed up out of the gaping hole 
that was half-filled with former walls and ceiling. He heard something grinding at the end 
of the hallway and raced to it.

The entire dimly-lit passage vibrated as huge forces rotated and moved around him.  
Suddenly, as he passed a point and broke a rope with his feet, a thundering door dropped 
out of the ceiling.  Another dropped in front of him and something poked him up and 
down his right side.  He realized huge iron spikes in the walls were rather quickly 
grinding straight for him.

Each was longer than his arm.  He grabbed hold of one with each hand and pressed back, 
and a horrible grinding whine split the air as the walls were stopped.  The whine built and 
the spikes bent in his arms, and the walls moved toward him again, more spike with 
razor-tips coming to skewer him.  

Quickly he forced an entire row outward with heavy squeals and pressed his hands 
against he wall.  He skidded backward until his ankles hit more spikes.  Quickly kicking 
them down into the ground he made a brace of bent iron and shoved full force back into 
the wall.  It screamed as it ground backwards, the other wall moving also and taking the 
brace with it.  But he gained enough ground to keep walking and forcing the mechanism 
back open.

If he let go, it would only start again, so he worked his way down toward the far gate that 
had fallen, bending the spikes with his body as he struggled with the jerking wall and 
tried to shut his ears against the massive squealing mechanical protest.  Bending more 
spikes downward, he forced them into the stone floor and for a moment, they themselves 
held the wall back until its building pressure could bend them further.  

He set his hands under the iron door and lifted.  Its few tons were nothing compared to 
what he’d already shoved loose from the earth itself and he practically shot it up into the 
higher levels of the jail, breaking into a cell and crushing a debtor against the ceiling.  He 
stumbled farther down the corridor.

Another grinding immensity made the stones and his teeth rattle as he rounded a corner to 
see an enormous gate of iron sliding closed.  He ran to it and stuck his hands into the 
foot-thick iron gates that were only inches apart.  Immediately the hidden machinery, 
weighing tons itself, wailed.  He felt the doors continue sliding closed against him and 
realized it had to be the force of the river itself, diverted from its speeding, turbulent 
course into channels cut into the rock, that propelled these doors.  He set his lats and delts 
and shoved back against the doors’ progress.

The iron screeched in surprise.  The doors slowed imperceptible as Samson worked his 
arms deeper into the narrow space.  Grasping the far side and compressing the edges with 
his fingers, he found greater leverage and brought his swelling chest and lats join his arm-
strength to rival that of the river itself.  His triceps pressed dents into the iron and stopped 
the doors cold.

The screeching deepened into a shuddering moan that carried the vibrations of the 
struggling mechanisms deep in the rock.  A fast repeated popping echoed through the 
wall.  Samson shoved outward and the doors opened wider, iron groaning full-throated 
and throbbing, topped with the whine of heavy axles being bent and twisted back against 
the force of the water.  Suddenly the force increased and the doors started closing again, 
as if another sluice-gate had been opened, more gears deployed.  Samson shoved his 
shoulders between the rock and began pressing back outward with his hands.

The entire structure began trembling with the building pressure as Samson slowly 
conquered the machine.  His head bent forward and his hands sank into the solid iron 
door as it tried to crush him but was wrenched apart instead.  His arms were now half-
extended and huge crashes signaled the self-destruction of heavy gears and torque-wheels 
that cracked and bent, tumbling and smashing through walls.  Water rushed around him 
and overhead, dripping and spurting through cracks in the walls.  With a final heave 
Samson shot the door back into the walls, creating some kind of explosion.  Men 
screamed.

Farther along the corridor two more gates had swung inward and were now secure.  No 
bolt was slid in place as the full weight of the diverted river-flow sealed them directly.  
Samson ran and pounded his fists into the gates and heard them ring like bells, but not 
move.  He pressed his arms into them, but they resisted, the machinery locked and the 
river flowing full-bore against it.  

Samson pounded them again, and they dented under his fist.  Pounding against the central 
crack, he flattened it farther and farther until he punched right through.  Working his 
fingers and forearms against the steel, thinner than iron but immensely tougher, he bent 
the wall back onto itself.  Grunting and thrusting with his back and legs, he forced larger 
and larger sections to curl, reforming it with his hands.  The steel creaked and groaned as 
its integrity was destroyed by the teenage hands mercilessly warping it.  When the hole 
was big enough he stepped through and planting his feet, pressed against the door in the 
direction it had originally closed.  The supports couldn’t withstand almost twice the 
original pressure and suddenly not only did the doors burst back into the passageway, but 
tore the heavy jambs out of the wall.

Masonry rained down from the wall and ceiling and water gushed into the hall.  It flowed 
back toward the chamber he had escaped from, and Samson continued his way up into the 
prison.  

Soon the way was guarded against mere normal prisoners, with iron bars. Grabbing the 
bars in his fists, he easily forced them apart until his arms hit the next set.  He kept 
forcing, bending the two sets apart until he reached the third, then the forth, the iron 
squealing in protest against his man-strength.  When the hole was big enough, he pulled 
the bars out of the wall with a grunt and wadded them together, mashing inch-thick bars 
with his living muscle into a big ball of humiliated iron.  At the dark end of the passage, 
steps led up along a narrow passage to a trap door in the ceiling.

Samson decided it was time to bring the action to him.  At the base of the stairway, he set 
his hands into the walls and pressed outward.  The walls trembled and broke, unable to 
withstand his teen power.  Cracks spread all the way up and the entire ceiling fell in, 
spilling a mass of guards and prisoners.  Samson climbed up over the rubble of boulders 
and twisted bars, stepping on heads and legs and chests and crushing them 
indiscriminately.  

On that floor he doubled back, leaping over the holes in the floor he’d caused, and found 
where a huge crack in the ceiling that had opened in the floor of the main jailhouse. 
Jumping up, he secured his hands into the crack.  Suspended, he flared his lats and forced 
the crack to widen with a sound of splitting rock, cramming the edges apart until it was 
wide enough for him to launch himself with a one-arm pull-up into the air through two 
stories of rubble and burst through the top of the ruined wall to land amid falling bricks in 
the street. 

Limbs coated with blood and matted hair stuck out from piles of bricks and Samson 
laughed as he bent the arms back, cracking the bones out through the skin and hearing the 
trapped men shriek.  Running footsteps carried the sound of the mobilized Praetorian 
Guard blocking his way to the citadel on the Capitoline hill, where Commodus cowered.  
Laughing, Samson rushed the centurion and picking him up with one hand, slammed him 
down against his outstretched arm, backward.  His body sheared in half over that 
immobile arm.  Samson threw the halves into the stunned men and attacked them.

Knocking down and straddling one frightened man, Samson grabbed two more and 
forced the three of them between his legs, then caught two more and hauled them up with 
their waists in his arms.  With a jungle yell he squeezed his feet together, pulping the men 
amid cracking bones and spurting organ juice just as he crushed spines and guts with his 
unyielding arms in one burst.  The men literally exploded like overfilled bladders.  

He chased the fleeing soldiers and caught one every now and then, whipping his head 
around into the buildings that would cave in because of his fist (not their puny heads).  Or 
he’d place his fingers over the man’s face and crush it, squeezing the bones together and 
ripping the flesh loose while he begged.  Or he’d just knock him down and stomp him to 
death, leaving the mass no thicker than the stonework it’d been pounded into.  These 
delays allowed enough men to escape, and Samson smelt hot oil nearing the boiling 
point, somewhere above him.  He jumped up onto the sidewalk, sunk his foot into a wall 
and pulled it backward, brining the wall with it.  The roof fell in and men screeched as 
the oil spilled onto them as they fell to break against the stones and broken timbers.  The 
oil caught on furniture and a screaming cat.  Samson continue on, punching holes in walls 
just for the hell of it.

Terror spread through the city as if the ghost of Sulla had marched in again to sack and 
own it.  People thronged the city gates in the darkness, begging them to open and let the 
refugees escape.  Samson met a crowd pouring into a street and, at the intersection, 
grabbed one of the giant raised stones across the lane that allowed pedestrians to cross 
without descending into it.  Pulling it up out of the earth with an explosion of dirt, he 
swung the quarter-ton rock to clear a path in the fleeing mob, crushing them and 
splattering heads and bodies until they parted for him.  He hefted the rock up in one hand, 
allowing the denizens to witness the welling of that veined bicep up close, and lobbed it 
straight up in the air.  When the rock finally fell down after an excruciatingly long wait, 
its bomb-like whistle piercing the air, he hit it and sent rock fragments through the bodies 
of the horrified refugees.

Turning out of the street, Samson looked up to see the imposing Tarpeian Rock standing 
strong in the moonlight.  Gripping the cliff with his fingers, he climbed up the sheer face 
and pulled himself on top, surveying the jumbled mass of temples and buildings of the 
citadel that rose beyond the Servian wall protecting it.  Behind him the Roman Forum 
stretched toward the Stadium, and nearby on the lower peak of the Capitol, the roof of the 
Temple of Jupiter canted in the moonlight.  He could see more columns bulging out of 
place, and wooden braces trying to hold it all up.  The fire from the burning pot of oil had 
spread to a few more buildings.  

Samson walked up to the ancient, thick wall and crouched down.  Setting his fingers 
around the bottom of supporting section, he strained his back and shoved his shuddering 
legs into the rock beneath him.  The massive wall stood firm, immobile, as it had for 
centuries, repelling all invaders.  But it had never faced an invading force the like of 
Samson.

Teen biceps bulged and split, teen lats writhed and massed, teen traps growled and with a 
strain that would have crippled Hercules himself Samson began to uproot the wall from 
its stone bed.  The towering stonework trembled, then teetered as Samson lifted it an 
inch, then another, forcing it out of place.  The wall began to tilt with the gut-grinding 
creak of solid stone splitting under obscene pressures.  His arms trembled and his legs 
cramped but he tore the deep-planted wall loose and suddenly the middle of the wall bent 
inward and tumbled, with a crash.  Samson roared and propelled the thicker supporting 
tower up and out, smashing through the wall of the small temple beside it.  Something 
scampered past as titanic blocks of stone crashed and plummeted: and Samson chased.  A 
figure ducked into the glimmering sanctuary of Juno Moneta, crowning the hill.  Samson 
walked up the steps and called out:

“Do I need to pull this temple down too to flush you out, coward?”

With that he gripped a central column in his arms and squeezed.  The drum instantly 
fractured and a chunk shot out and broke off the nose of Juno on her throne.  Commodus 
ran out of the shadows, crying “Don’t!” 

Samson released the pillar and as the building settled against the cracked stone, a strained 
popping shooting out the roof, Commodus whimpered and urine darkened his imperial 
robe.  Samson grabbed him by the neck and lifted him in the air.

“I’ve been looking for you.” 

***

The Colosseum stank of river slime and the rot of carcasses not yet collected; usually the 
remains of contests were efficiently taken away and the stadium cleansed, but Samson 
had disrupted the usual routine.  Ant and fly-swarmed meat lay throughout the drained 
arena, making a hellish reek.  

Commodus hung paralyzed under Samson’s armpit, crushed into immobility by his 
curled arm.  Samson carried the emperor to the middle of the moonlit arena and flung 
him against a pylon, shattering the man’s collarbone.

“I said I would face Hercules Romanus in the arena if triumphant.  I not only slaughtered 
your beasts and champions with my bare hands, I’ve destroyed your prison, breached 
your citadel’s mighty wall, killed or dispersed your garrison and leveled a number of 
buildings.  Do I have to tear down every brick in the city before you’ll honor my 
challenge?”

His Latin had improved.  The emperor no longer doubted his meaning.

Commodus stuttered and Samson mocked his stutter.  The degraded monarch explained 
that out of deference to his divinity, his opponents would fight him while chained to the 
pylons.  Samson chuckled and swelled his chest, and hocked thick phlegm into the man’s 
open mouth.

“Swallow,” he commanded.  The emperor obeyed.  “I think I know which one of us is 
God here.”

Samson gave himself three hard strokes and brought his sleeping manhood to full alert.  
Commodus trembled at the girth of the boycock as it slapped against his abs well above 
his navel, so huge yet pointed straight up as if to bind the stars with his ropy seed.  His 
own little prick rose in angry defiant adoration.  Samson saw the hard little bulge behind 
the man’s robe and guffawed at it.  That only made it quiver and spot the white linen with 
thin wetness.  

Samson walked over and stroked the emperor: then pulled down gently on the cock.  
Then pulled harder.  Then cracked it down; it bulged with blood and suddenly he ripped 
it out of Commodus’s body and shoved it into his mouth.  His other hands grabbed the 
emperor’s testicles and pulverized them in their sac with a hearty squeeze, then stuffed 
them into the spurting hole to plug it up.  He picked the shocked man up and ripped the 
clothing off his wizened slack body.  Lowering the man onto his boyshaft, he screwed 
him around onto his own cock, feeling the weak resistant flesh spread and tear as his 
virility forced its way into his softness.  Commodus gagged and choked and with his 
fuckfinger Samson shoved the cock down his throat into his belly.  

Commodus sucked air and screamed, spraying Samson’s pecs with blood and foul-
smelling spittle.  Samson further impaled him, feeling the tightness of the bowels caress 
him.  He let Commodus fall back against the pylon and grabbed the man’s legs, pulling 
them around his hips … then pulling them out of their sockets.  Quick squeezes shattered 
the bones and made them more pliable, and bent the knees backward until they snapped.  
He twisted the legs around each other to hold the man tightly to his tiny waist, knotting 
the bulging flesh loosely.  

The emperor flopped and flailed, and Commodus caught his hand and guided his fingers 
one by one into the crevice between his pecs, and crushed them by flexing those mounds 
together.  Commodus sputtered and begged.  Samson carried him around the arena, 
calling out to imaginary spectators and working his pecs against the bones of the man’s 
wrists, then the forearms, bending the bones together until they snapped and fractured 
lengthwise, then bouncing his pecs to grind the bones into fragments.  He felt the man’s 
heart begin to stagger-race.

Pulling him up off his spear cock, he kept the head just inside and willed heavy come to 
spurt up.  The thick semi-fluid mass of jism gooped out and formed a kind of plug to 
keep the man sealed shut, and Samson pulled out.  Gently untangling his legs, he lay the 
man down onto the rotting, ant-covered slime of the rhinoceros, and arranged him to be 
comfortable, let his heart rest.  Straddling him as the ants began biting his flesh, he 
shoved his shit-stained cock down the man’s throat gently, plunging slowly in and out to 
clean himself off.  Then he shot more come into the man’s belly below his lungs, to seal 
him off on that end.  Pulling out, he milked a gob of paste-like jizz into his palm and 
plastered over the new man-twat he’d created in Commodus’s loins.  Now he was ready 
to begin.  

Commodus squealed pleas for his life.  Samson just smiled lovingly as his hands circled 
Commodus waist and slowly constricted it.  The watery guts, sealed in by Samson’s 
cock-spit, stretched the skin out on other side of his hands, until the skin reddened and 
tore.  Samson relaxed.  He grabbed the arm of Hercules Romanus and ordered the man to 
flex his muscles.  The stunned man could barely obey until Samson’s thundering voice 
commanded the muscles to obey him on their own, apart from the brain and will.  The 
muscles flexed and Samson squeezed them between his fingers until they popped like 
rotten fruit.  Then he gently pulled them loose from the joints and lets them sag within the 
wall of skin that remains bruised but unbroken, and, using only his fingers and slow 
pressure, popped the joints themselves.

The emperor’s eyes rolled with the searing sheets of agony.  Samson flipped him over, 
pressing his turned faced against the gaping hole where the rhino’s heart had been ripped 
out, and Commodus saw a rat inside which angrily bit his face.  Samson ignored his 
screams to feel the slack muscles in the emperor’s back, find each one and pinching it 
until it ruptured, then working it loose from the tendons.  Slowly, oh so slowly, he 
dismembered Commodus from the inside out.  

Samson turned him over again, pulled the rat off his face and twisted it in half over the 
divine monarch’s mouth, squeezing out the contents.  Commodus’s head began to jitter 
and twitch, so the boy slapped him a few times to make his eyes focus.  Then he went 
after the emperor’s thighs and glutes.

He felt the largest of his scrawny muscles implode and shoot new fire into his reeling 
mind.  The bones were mostly already broken so Samson delicately pulled the tendons 
loose from the bone fragments while maintaining the skin’s integrity.  Commodus’ heart 
stopped, but a kick pound from Samson’s fist started it again.

Samson palmed him into the air by the head, and quickly but calmly worked his 
squeezing fingers through the abdominal musculature, raising purple splotches as blood 
collected.  Commodus eyes went white.  One by one, Samson bend and broke the ribs 
downward so no internal or external punctures occurred.  

Commodus still lived, and Samson bent him backwards gently, lovingly, listening to the 
crackling spine chip and stretch.  The spine snapped and the king’s legs went limp while 
his mouth formed wordless, airy sighs.  Samson bent him farther, cracking each vertebra 
one by one until the emperor’s head was doubled back asshole.  Staring the emperor in 
the eyes one last time so the boy’s face would be the last thing Commodus carried with 
him into hell, he smiled and began stuffing it inside the stretched-out, gummy-come 
sealed portal.  The skull cracked beneath his fingers just enough to allow easier un-birth, 
and Commodus suddenly felt his world go darker and hotter and stiflingly tight.  Samson 
then tied the arms and legs together into knots over the ass-head to make sure it stayed in, 
and hung it on a pylon. 

Quickly he dragged the remaining corpses in the arena around the twitching Commodus-
wreath and arranged them like a royal audience.  The moon was balanced on the rim of 
the arena as Commodus suffocated to death inside his own ass, his body seizing and 
jittering until it finally went still.  Samson looked up at the position of the moon and 
realized it was his seventeenth birthday.  He left the arena through a vast vaulted 
passageway grabbing the outmost wall, pulled it outward.  The stone withstood him for a 
second, then cracked and broke, collapsing into the street and dragging tons of brick 
stairways and vomitoria down with it.  

The mobs still thronged the locked gates and Samson walked to the edge of the crowd 
before the Porta Viminalis, spread his arms, and pushed.  “Go to the stadium to see your 
emperor at his best!” he cried, but they only shrieked and hammered on the gates.  His 
thighs easily drove the citizens, slaves and aliens into one classless clump, mashing them 
against the gates that strained to hold them in.  The giant oaken bolt across the doors bent 
under the increasing slaughter-pressure, finally cracking.  The gate flew open and spewed 
smashed and broken people out into the surrounding buildings.  He kicked stones and 
people out of his way, launching them hundreds of feet, straight through the roofs and 
walls of the suburban sprawl.  As he strode out he saw two eyes in the darkness.  He 
stopped and curled his finger, that distended bicep gleaming in the moon and firelight.  A 
boy emerged: the imperial page.  

He had been spared after all, though his ass had been fucked raw and he’d been thrown 
out of the city.  Samson jerked a handful of rich come to plaster the boy’s bleeding 
asshole with.  At first the saltiness stung but then the viscous substance began to soothe 
him.  Samson lifted the boy up into the air and let him ride on his bicep, held out and firm 
but not hardened, and the boy’s cock immediately saluted its new master.  As he rode that 
undulating surface, the page reached down and dabbed his finger into the semen around 
his ass and savored it with his tongue.  His eyes fluttered at the gamy strength of the seed, 
and he gripped the upright, immovable forearm for support.

Samson walked up the Via Latina with the boy on his arm and was never heard from 
again.

***

Four emperors succeeded the corrupt Commodus the year following his murder.  Order 
was finally restored under the strong-armed Septimus Severus and his brilliant wife, Julia 
Domna.  The humiliating legacy of a youth of titanic physical strength, a Sarmatian 
warrior calling himself Samson, was erased from the annals of Rome throughout the 
empire, his exploits buried and the ruins he left behind either repaired or sealed forever.  
His existence is known only as the rumor that Commodus was strangled in his bed one 
night by a professional wrestler, the result of a plot engineered his mistress Marcia.  It 
was New Year’s Eve, AD 192, and the glorious reign of the Antonines, begun in the ruin 
of the previous century, had come to an ignominious end.  The Severans would be no 
better.

Some say he went in search of his people, to destroy them utterly.  Some say he followed 
a path to the Americas, where he was worshipped as a white savage thunder-god.  Some 
say he ventured into the southern continent of Libya to slaughter animals and entire 
societies.  Others say he was too strong to ever die, and roams the night still, a vengeful 
dark evil unmoored from the past, seeking whom he may devour.  

The End.

Chipmasterson@yahoo.com